Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
soon became the dominant sign of the Industrial Revolution in much the way
that the Internet came to symbolize postmodern capitalism. The enormous
costs of constructing and maintaining such networks, however, required high
volumes of tra
c to amortize expenses over numerous clients. Fortunately,
the velocities of the new system were popular: British passengers increased
from 5.4 million in 1838 to 170 million in 1862.
Originally British railroads deployed the four-foot, eight-inch gauge of
the coal mines, which was itself a vestige of the width of Roman chariots in
Britain two millennia earlier (Pomeranz and Topik 1999). The integration of
wider markets, however, required standardized tracks, which led other coun-
tries eventually to adopt the British standard. The standardization of di
ff
er-
ent European rail gauges was
finally accomplished with the International
Railway Conference of 1882, a process that took more than a decade to unfold.
In Russia, railroads helped to forestall a decline into Third World country
status (Marks 2007). With the opening of the Moscow-St. Petersburg line
in 1851, Russia's railroads zoomed from 700 total miles in 1860 to 12,500 in
1878, to 21,000 in 1894, and 36,000 in 1900. The
fi
first leg of the Trans-
Siberian railroad opened in 1903, stretching 6,000 miles from Moscow to
Vladivostok; by reducing journey times between Europe and Asian Russia
from months to days, it brought the vast resources of Siberia into the tsarist
spatial division of labor. Within a decade, 2.5 million Russian settlers were
living in northeast Asia. The Trans-Siberian railroad was therefore central
in making Russia into a formidable land power, a point important to the
geopolitics of Halford Mackinder (1904). Similarly, the Japanese rail system
fi
fi
cation of
Japanese space following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In Italy, the railroad
became an instrument of national uni
first linked Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, part of the rapid uni
fi
cation, a process achieved in the face of
the growing economic and political ascendancy of the north at the expense of
the peninsula's southern districts. Transportation integration in Italy came late,
however, with the Florence to Rome line completed only in 1933.
The French railroad system, centered, naturally, upon Paris, soon made the
capital accessible to people throughout the nation; equally important, it
made French peripheral territories accessible to Parisian capitalists (Figure
4.1). The French rail system generated a condensed geography in which all
cities approached Paris, and vice versa, deeply reinforcing the centrality of
the capital that had been growing since the late Middle Ages. Lines ending at
di
fi
ected the dominant conception that railroads
did not go through Paris, they simply ended there (Vance 1990). Schivelbusch
(1978:32) notes that French observers of the early railroads saw how they led
to smaller towns such as Louvres or Chartres e
ff
erent stations in Paris re
fl
ectively becoming “lost in
some street of Paris or its suburbs.” German poet Heinrich Heine captured
this spatial restructuring and the disorientation it generated while comment-
ing on the new rail line between Paris and Orleans in 1843:
ff
What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our
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