Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
turn, reinforced the very process of time-space compression that gave birth to
them, making it possible, for example, for more people to read about distant
places in the world.
Another consequence of railroad time-space compression was in the
expanding geographies of mass tourism. Prior to the railroad, for example,
high transport costs kept isolated areas far from the reach of the urban
masses and were often the recreational preserves of wealthy elites. Virilio
(1995:79) notes ironically “while the
first socialists were dreaming of bringing
down the class structure, railway companies were inaugurating a new class
structure,
the speed classes
” (emphasis in original). Like everything else, vel-
ocity became a commodity, and the ability to consume it a marker of social
status. The railroad made the Grand Tour of Europe, a
de rigueur
rite of
passage for the educated petit-bourgeoisie on both sides of the Atlantic,
obsolete as hotels, newspapers and the new technologies of transportation all
made the process of mass tourism more comfortable, safe, and reliable, facili-
tating the mass movement of people across and within national boundaries
and encouraging widespread appreciation of cultural di
fi
erences. In the
1840s, Thomas Cook began to organize cheap train trips to the coasts of
Britain for working-class families. Railroads in the nineteenth century and
airplanes in the twentieth opened exotic spaces to the middle classes, who
frequently took them over, often destroying the very uniqueness that made
them attractive in the
ff
first place (robbing them of their auras). Places, like
goods, became standardized and commodi
fi
ed, locked into an increasingly
national, then global, system of production, circulation, and consumption.
In the words of Schivelbusch (1978:40), “For twentieth century tourism, the
world has become one big department store of landscapes and cities.”
In European colonies, too, the railroad unleashed enormous time-space
impacts, although in contrast to colonial countries these were generally
designed to favor the broader process of exploitation and surplus value con-
struction. Yet unlike the West, these technologies served not as instruments
of industrial development but as mechanisms of colonial control designed
not to integrate the populace into coherent entities, but to incorporate them
selectively into the expanding global capitalist division of labor. In India, for
example, British railroads began in 1853, but rose rapidly following the Sepoy
Mutiny of 1857 to become the largest railroad system in the colonial world,
primarily to facilitate cotton and jute exports to the textile mills at home and
the movement of troops to control the native population. By 1870, they had
laid 4,500 miles of track, which by 1936 expanded to 43,000 miles, the fourth-
largest network in the world. Investors in Indian railroads were guaranteed a
5 percent annual rate of return by the British government. Similarly, in south-
ern Africa, rail lines were central to Cecil Rhodes's paci
fi
fi
cation program.
Je
erson (1928) noted that by the 1920s, the vast majority of the population of
the economically developed world lived within 10 miles of the “civilizing rails,”
blanketed by a network that suggested near-ubiquity of access. Conversely,
relatively few people in Asia, Africa, or Latin America did so.
ff
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