Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
like the Roman and Chinese empires, whose achievements in connecting
space were similarly fundamental to their success as large-scale systems”
(Dodgshon 1998:82). Beginning with the
fi
first line in Quincy, Massachusetts
in 1826, Boston became the world's
first rail hub, with three radial lines. As
Vance (1990) notes, it took only 43 years to move from the
fi
first rail line in
1826 to the famous transcontinental connection of the Union Paci
fi
fi
c and
Central Paci
c lines at Promontory Point, Utah on May 10, 1869, suturing
together the multitude of farms, towns, and cities stretched across North
America. Thus, distances from New York that took six weeks to be traversed
in 1830 could be crossed in one week by 1857.
American railroads had inestimably profound impacts on the country's
social, urban, and economic geography, opening the coal-mining districts of
Appalachia and the meat and grain belt of the Midwest alike. The time-space
e
fi
ects of the railroad system were highly uneven geographically, and inte-
grated the Northeast and Midwest far more than they did the Northeast and
the South. Just as there were signi
ff
erences in the urban and regional
impacts of railroads between Britain and France, so too in the U.S. did the
consequences of railroads vary yet again. Because American labor was
expensive and land was cheap—the exact opposite of Europe—railroads in
the U.S. tended to curve much more around hills and valleys (Schivelbusch
1977). The identical technology had signi
fi
cant di
ff
erent consequences,
depending upon the spatial context in which it was adopted, an important
point in the refutation of simplistic technological determinism. American
railroads were instrumental in opening up the vast wilderness of the contin-
ental interior, and train travelers across the prairies compared themselves to
ships on land. In essence, this wave of time-space compression turned the
Great Plains and Prairies into a giant agricultural bread basket, process that
established Chicago as the premier center of capital accumulation in the
continental interior. The completion of national rail networks also facilitated
the specialization of individual cities, which often realized comparative
advantages based on local resources, strategic locations, and contingent pools
of labor skills. Chicago witnessed particularly explosive growth in the 1840s
due to its location as a transportation hub (Cronon 1991). The huge wave of
time-space compression that railroads unfolded across North America cata-
pulted Chicago from a tiny backwater to become the world's
fi
cantly di
ff
first commodity
market and futures exchange. The advent of commodities futures further
standardized and commodi
fi
ers a compelling
account of how the accelerated velocity and improved reliability of ship-
ments brought the Midwest steadily into the orbit of eastern capital. Shortly
after the Civil War, the Rocky Mountains and West Coast were incorporated
into the American space-economy, which soon thereafter became the largest
in the world, surpassing Britain in the 1890s. The gulf between the East and
West Coasts was
fi
ed time itself. Cronon (1991) o
ff
finally breached by the telegraph wires in 1861 and railroads
in 1869 (Table 4.1); in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. railroad network
formed a dense spider web over the eastern half of the country (Figure 4.3), a
fi
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