Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 4.1
U.S. railroad and telegraph capacity, 1848-1902
1848
1852
1860
1870
1880
1890
1902
Rail track (000s miles)
5.9
12.9
30.6
52.9
115.6
208.2
252.5
Freight (millions of tons)
10.6
17.6
46.5
147.6
338.9
691.4
1,200.7
Telegraph wire (000s miles)
3.4
23.3
56.0
133.6
291.2
848.8
1,307.0
Messages (millions per year)
0.5
1.4
5.0
11.5
31.7
58.4
89.7
Source:
Fields (2004:65).
system that represented 40 percent of the world's railroad capacity. The
heady triumphalism of American expansionism brought on by the railroad
led Andrew Carnegie to exult in 1886 that “The old nations of the earth creep
on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express”
(quoted in Pomeranz and Topik 1999:203).
Far from constituting some mythical process of “free market” expansion,
the growth of the railroads was actively abetted by the state, including the
land grants introduced in 1850; even at the height of laissez-faire capitalism,
the reconstruction of time and space necessitated government intervention.
In the U.S., the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 standardized rail gauges.
Thus, rather than allowing unfettered supply and demand, the state inter-
vened actively to facilitate the time-space compression of industrial capital-
ism. This process e
ectively allowed politically powerful commercial interests
located on the East Coast to gain easy access to the resources and markets
situated in the Midwest and West. Thus, national integration, industrializa-
tion and urbanization, state intervention and private capital, and geographic
transformation all comprised di
ff
erent facets of a broader process by which
industrial capitalism triumphed over North America.
One of the most signi
ff
cant long-term impacts of the relational geograph-
ies that the railroad fostered was the rise of dramatically expanded markets
on the scale of the nation-state. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, with
markets highly localized and self-su
fi
cient, long-distance trade was compara-
tively rare. In 1817, for example, it took 52 days to ship goods from Cincinnati
to New York using wagons and rivers (Fields 2004). Between 1830 and 1857,
most of the country was within a few days' travel of New York (Figure 4.4).
Interregional commerce tended to be export-oriented and controlled by mer-
chants in large, East Coast cities. As long as production and consumption
were con
ned to regional markets, goods retained the identity of their origin.
The revolutionary wave of late nineteenth-century time-space compression,
however, allowed the sphere of circulation to be harnessed by large-scale
commercial providers, who lowered costs, increased productivity, and raised
pro
fi
ect-
ive ways, expanding business operations by diminishing geographic barriers
(Fogel 1964). For example, Fields (2004) shows how G.F. Swift's meat-
packing company revolutionized the dressed beef industry in the 1870s and
fi
ts while using the new technologies to conquer space in ever-more e
ff
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