Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
II. Die Wahrnehmungen von Raum / The perceptions of space - Robert Lee: Railways, space and imperialism
Robert Lee were political, like the resistance of traditional elites, or, if these were defeated or bought off, popular resistance which could become guerrilla war against a railway. A further political obstacle could be the rivalry of another Western power. Whatever the obstacles, and whether the railway was ever completed or not, the aim remained the same: the creation of a hinterland. From Manchuria to the Argentine pampas; from the Great Lakes to the African high veldt; from Yunnan to the Australian bush, the motives and methods remained the same. Thus, colonial railways were part of this process of the spread of empire, its economic patterns, its ideas and its institutions. The process was essentially the same throughout the world: production of new commodities to feed the burgeoning industries of the West; new populations to produce them; new patterns of land ownership, often involving the dispossession of previous inhabitants; new legal codes to make the conquered lands safe for investment and exploitation. Such was the story everywhere empires expanded. The spread of railways around the world in the late nineteenth century was a technological triumph. It was also, of course, the creation of the means for the exploitation of natural resources and human beings in ways that they had never been exploited before. This negative side of the spread of railways is not one on which contemporaries were inclined to dwell. Naturally enough, they looked to exciting and impressive achievements - the bridges over tropical ravines, the alignments cut along ledges in cliffs or through jungles, the savagery of the native populations or fauna (the famous engineereating lions on the Uganda Railway are the most notable example of this!) - and ignored the mounting piles of coolies’ bodies which often attended the construction of such spectacular lines.7 East and southeast Asia is especially interesting as a study of this phenomenon, since at the time it was a patchwork of colonies and independent traditional states. In retrospect, the experiences and developments in colonised and non-colonised Asian states appear to have more in common than perhaps was apparent at the time. In both cases, there were crucial changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the administrative structures of Asian states were modernised and made to conform to ■' There is an entertaining and perceptive account of the Uganda Railway’s lions in Fernàndez- A rm e s t o, Felipe: Millennium, a history of our last thousand years. London 1996, p. 424-426. A relevant example of the horrifying mortality rates common during the construction of tropical railways was the French railway from Haiphong (Vietnam to Kunming China) 94
