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the
railway revolution
This page looks at the other revolutionary network: the
railroad.
national studies
The North American Railroad (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
Uni Press 95) by James Vance and Politics &
Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States
& Prussia (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 94) by
Colleen Dunlavy are valuable for its
exploration of the interaction between markets, private
funding and government support.
Albert Schram's Railways
& the Formation of the Italian State in the 19th
Century (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 97). Terence
Gourvish's Railways & the British Economy
1830-1914 (London, Macmillan 80) and Jack Simmons' The
Railway in England & Wales, 1830-1914 (Leicester,
Leicester Uni Press 78) offer insights into development in
the UK. Gourvish's British Railways: A Business History
(Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 86) is of particular
value.
Motion & Means: Mapping Opposition to Railways in
Victorian Britain, a paper
by Leigh Denault & Jennifer Landish, offers a
perspective on contemporary distress about technology.
the shape of the revolution
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The
Industrialisation of Time & Space in the 19th Century
(Berkeley, Uni of California Press 87) is a
provocative account of the world the railways made,
complete with insights into contemporary bugaboos that
sound much like anxieties about the internet as a sewer
from hell. The Railroad in American Art: Representations
of Technology & Change, (Cambridge, MIT Press 90)
edited by Leo Marx is suggestive and extends his The
Machine in the Garden: Technology & the Pastoral Ideal
in America (New York, Oxford Uni Press 67).
The US Consortium for National Research Initiatives has
published an excellent series
of papers on railways and other models for global
digital networks. Bruce Mazlish's The Railroad &
the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy
(Cambridge, MIT Press 65) has a period flavour but is
salted with insights.
John McKay's Tramways & Trolleys: The Rise of Urban
Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton, Princeton Uni
Press 76) is a cogent exploration of the growth of
suburbia.
growth and regulation
Gabriel Kolko's exemplary Railroads & Regulation
(Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 65) and Alfred Chandler's Railroads,
the Nation's First Big Business (New York, Columbia
Uni Press 65) offer a point of reference for those
favouring the railway as a metaphor for the web. Frank
Dobbin's Forging Industrial Policy: The United States,
Britain and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press 91) is a thoughtful study of
precursors to the national information infrastructure
initiatives favoured during the 1990s.
A
History of the ICC: From Panacea to Palliative (New
York, Norton 76) by Ari & Olive Hoogenboom and Richard
Stone's The Interstate Commerce Commission and the
Railroad Industry: A History of Regulatory Policy (New
York, Praeger 91) give a
perspective on ICANN. For the UK Henry Parris's Government
& the Railways in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London,
Routledge 65) is still of value
Robert Fogel's Railroads & American Economic
Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore,
Johns Hopkins Uni Press 64) and Albert Fishlow's American
Railroads & the Transformation of the American Economy
(Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 65) are persuasive studies
that question the notion of railways as the primary engine
of US economic development. Gary Hawke's Railways
and Economic Growth in England & Wales 1840-1870
(Oxford, Clarendon Press 90) is less revisionist.
There's a less revisionist
account in Anthony Heywood's Modernising Lenin's
Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade & the
Railways, 1917-1924 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press
99).
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