Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
With incomes rising and travel times falling, the industry came to rely on
tourism as its principal source of revenue. Steamships came to monopolize
maritime travel and to be viewed in the popular imagination as majestic and
stately rather than cramped and uncomfortable. Higher speeds, however, also
involved greater risks of collision with debris, other ships, or icebergs. Some
ships, such as the
City of Glasgow
, which left Liverpool in 1854 with 500
passengers, simply disappeared, swallowed up by the ocean. The calamitous
sinking of the
Titanic
in 1912 likewise raised questions about the value or
necessity of speed and the virtues of slow, safe travel.
Steamships reduced shipping costs as well as times dramatically, producing
a huge cost-space convergence: freight rates across the Atlantic dropped by
80 percent between 1815 and 1850, then by another 70 percent between 1870
and 1900 (Pomeranz and Topik 1999:49). These price declines were not evenly
distributed, however; North American steamships were 25 to 50 percent more
expensive to operate than their European counterparts. In the face of such
cost reductions, trade was no longer dominated by luxuries, and the world
economy bound supplier and client regions together through the trade of
low-priced commodities such as grains and wood, allowing Europe once
again to escape its domestic ecological constraints. As the cost of moving
goods across the oceans declined, Europe, led by Britain, became steadily
more dependent upon imported foods, lumber, and other commodities.
Refrigerator ships and canning introduced in the 1870s opened up the world
periphery to meat production, allowing mutton and veal to be shipped to
Europe from Australia, New Zealand, and the Argentina pampas, giving rise
to the culture of the gaucho.
Outside of the Atlantic, steamships had similar e
ects. Steamer service
from London to Calcutta began in 1825, a voyage of 113 days; the
ff
rst
British steamships sailed up the Ganges in 1834. European service to South
America began in 1857, and to West Africa three years later. In the colonies,
steamships allowed not only quicker and more reliable movement of goods
and people, but the penetration of river systems. Indeed, steamers penetrating
dangerous equatorial rivers became the embodiment of colonialism's quest
to domesticate the wild savage, an image made famous by Joseph Conrad in
Heart of Darkness
, much as locomotives and the “civilizing rails” tamed
grasslands and prairies. Coal-
fi
red steamships' need for periodic refueling
also propelled a series of ports into new nodes of signi
fi
cance, such as
Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, and Singapore (Knowles 1986), a need that also
formed part of Admiral Perry's forced entry into Yokohama harbor in 1853.
After the completion of the Suez Canal in 1859, steamship visits to
Southeast Asia and China were regularized, and became instrumental parts
of the governance of colonial empires. The cost-space compression that fol-
lowed the opening of Suez had worldwide implications, greatly shortening the
absolute as well as relative shipping distances between Europe and Asia
(Figure 4.7). Within three months of opening, the Suez cut 47 percent of
fi
of
the travel distance between London and Bombay, and 29 percent between
ff
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