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, Unfinished Business The Railroad in American Life (Hanover: Uni Press of New England 97) by Maury Klein 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 superb 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 & the Railroad Industry: A History of Regulatory Policy (New York: Praeger 91), and The Market that Antitrust Built: Public Policy, Private Coercion, and Railroad Acquisitions, 1825-1922 (PDF) by Frank Dobbin & Timothy Dowd 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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