The Transformation of the World (154 page)

1 Communications

Steamships

In the history of transportation, there is often no way around a mild form of technological determinism. New means of transportation do not appear because there is a cultural craving for them, but because someone comes up with the idea of creating them. It is another story whether they then catch on, fall flat, or are endowed with special meanings and functions. If we leave aside the towing of water vessels by sheer muscle power, ship travel—unlike land transportation—had always used nonorganic energy in the form of wind and current. Steam power added to these possibilities. In two parts of the world—England (with southern Scotland) and the northeastern United States, both pioneers of industrialization—prior modernization of the transportation landscape worked to the advantage of the steamship and railroad locomotive. Canal systems had already been laid out by commercially minded private landowners eager to increase the value of their land; in England the height of the enthusiasm for canals (also a highly popular investment) was reached between 1791 and 1794. They created part of the demand that the railroad would meet even better. Indeed, the “canal age” evoked by some historians stretched into the early part of the railroad age; the two forms of transportation partly competed with each other and partly linked into wider systems. By the middle of the nineteenth century, more than 25,000 cargo barges were operating on Britain's inland waterways, and a mobile, “amphibious” population of no fewer than 50,000 people, one-third of them employed by large companies, lived aboard them.
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The boats were mainly drawn by horses, whereas in Asia human traction continued for a long time to perform the backbreaking work. Until the 1940s small ships were hauled upriver by “coolies” through the rapids of the Upper Yangtze that have now disappeared into the Three Gorges reservoir.

Steamships were too large for the canals of the eighteenth century. But since they could travel smoothly over still waters, they gave a major impetus to the construction of wider and longer canals. Many a city entered a new phase of development when it was connected to one: New York, for example, after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, or Amsterdam after the completion of the North Sea Canal in 1876. In the Netherlands, the personal interest of King William I helped in the creation of a closed canal network for the purposes of both transportation and water regulation. Its successful completion, thanks to a competent corps of engineers dating back to the time of the French occupation, meant that the country delayed the construction of a railroad system.
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In the United States, the first railroads were seen as no more than feeders for canal transportation. In New York State, trains were prohibited until 1851 from carrying freight in competition with publicly owned canals.
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The steamship, which in long-distance traffic prevailed over the sailing vessel in the crucial decade of the 1860s, did not rely on an external energy supply.
It carried its own fuel on board: coal and then increasingly oil, after diesel engines—invented by the brilliant German engineer, Rudolf Diesel, during the 1890s—were introduced into shipping in the 1910s.
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Being able to navigate independently, it was less at the mercy of the elements than the sailing ship had been and was therefore ideal for travel along coasts, against river currents, or on windless lakes and canals. This new freedom allowed shipping to keep to a schedule for the first time in history; the relations that made up a network became dependable and open to calculation. The early impact of the steamship was greatest within the technological and economic heartlands of Europe and North America: Glasgow saw one arrive every ten minutes in the 1830s,
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while a regular service between Vienna and Budapest, inaugurated in 1826 and taken over in 1829 by the famous Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft (one of the longest words in the German language), had a fleet of seventy-one ships by 1850 for a trip lasting roughly fourteen hours.
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The supply of transportation capacity interacted with new kinds of demand. Steamship expansion on the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, for example, was closely bound up with the growth of cotton-producing slave plantations.

Not all steamships operated as part of a network. In some situations, where they spearheaded a drive to open up new regions for commercial activity, they were more like pioneering instruments of capitalist world trade. Nor were they necessarily under foreign control. From the 1860s on, the Chinese state took initiatives of its own (later supplemented by private companies) and successfully prevented the establishment of a foreign trading monopoly on the country's great rivers and coastal strips.
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The competitive advantage of British (and later Japanese) shipping companies in China was less pronounced than in India, where indigenous shipowners were unable to secure a significant foothold in the market. One of the reasons for this was that British companies active in India were officially appointed to carry mail and received substantial subsidies for this service.

Moreover, in neither semicolonial China nor colonial India did indigenous forces (private or public) ever succeed in creating an overseas fleet. In this too, Japan was the great exception in the Afro-Asian world. The fact that, by 1918 at the latest, its military and mercantile shipbuilding industry had reached world level, making the country a leading force in commercial shipping as well as a topclass naval power, was both an expression of and a contributory factor in its national success.
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Everywhere else in Asia (the same is true of Latin America) new relations of technological and economic dependence were visible in the control that foreign shipping lines had over overseas trade. It is characteristic that the Tata steel family in India, otherwise highly successful, failed in their attempt to open up a shipping route to Japan, largely because of British competition.
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From 1828, when Lord William Bentinck arrived by steamship in Calcutta to assume his post as governor-general, the British attached great practical and symbolic significance to the vessels as heralds of a new era.

The first ocean steamship lines came into operation across the North Atlantic. The technological advances during the first half of the nineteenth century were so great that the journey time of fourteen days between Bristol and New York, already possible by midcentury, stood virtually unchallenged during the next few decades.
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The beginning of the great migration to the New World then created a passenger demand of novel proportions. The same was not true of other parts of the globe, where, as in India, subsidized mail steamers became the driving force of maritime expansion. No imperial or colonial power thought it could afford to do without its own postal service between the mother country and its overseas possessions. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 triggered a further growth of passenger transportation between Europe and Asia, while the shipping lines also did a roaring trade in tropical exports. Although, thanks to its huge internal market, the United States rose after midcentury to become the largest shipping nation in the world, Britain hung on to its leading position in overseas transportation. In 1914 it still accounted for 45 percent of world commercial tonnage, followed by Germany (11 percent) and the United States (9 percent). Japan had reached 3.8 percent, just behind France (4.2 percent) but in front of the Netherlands (3.2 percent) that had dominated the seas in the seventeenth century.
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World maritime trade should not be thought of as an evenly connected network; it did not embrace vast regions such as northern Asia (which acquired an ice-free port only in 1860 with the founding of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. By the criterion of seagoing tonnage, the world's four main ports in 1888 were London, New York, Liverpool, and Hamburg. Hong Kong—the gateway to the Chinese market and a major transhipment center for Southeast Asia—trailed behind in seventh place, but it was already far ahead of any other Asian port.
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The major shipping routes were: (1) from Japan and Hong Kong to the Atlantic and North Sea ports, via the Strait of Malacca (Singapore), the northern Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Suez Canal, and Straits of Gibraltar; (2) from Australia to the Cape of Good Hope and then along the African West coast to Europe; (3) from New York to London and Liverpool (the widest shipping lane of all); (4) from Europe to Rio de Janeiro and the River Plate ports; and (5) across the Pacific from San Francisco and Seattle to Yokohama, the leading port of Japan.
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Thus, although world shipping had a presence here and there in the remotest Pacific islands by 1900, it displayed a high degree of geographical concentration.

The sector itself was also highly concentrated. This was the great age of the private shipping companies (the state, despite a fin-de-siècle enthusiasm for “naval power,” was much less involved than in the railroads), and some were among the best capitalized joint stock corporations in the world. Their hallmarks were regularity and punctuality, good service across a range of price categories, and safety standards which—despite some spectacular accidents, such as the sinking of the
Titanic
off Newfoundland on April 14, 1912—would have been scarcely imaginable in the age of the sailing ship, or even in the early decades of steamship travel. The major companies, such as the Holland-America Lijn, Norddeutscher Lloyd,
Hamburg-Amerika-Linie (or HAPAG), Cunard, Alfred Holt, or and Peninsula & Oriental Line, embodied at one and the same time a capitalism with global reach, a high level of technological perfection, and claims to superior civilization associated with sophisticated travel. The luxurious “swimming palaces” (a popular advertising cliché) became emblematic of the last three decades before the First World War.
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From the 1860s on, national rivalry among the great shipping lines was repeatedly offset by the sharing out of markets and cartel-like “shipping conferences” that served to hold prices steady.

Although world shipping under northwestern European and North American control included all coastal regions between the 40
^th
parallel south and the 50
^th
parallel north in its global timetable, this was still not a truly global transportation network if measured against the airline yardstick of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
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Only air travel would overcome the rift between land and sea, operating between air
ports
most of which are located inland. Virtually no large city in today's world lies outside the air network, and the frequency of contact is infinitely greater than it was in the heyday of passenger shipping. Moreover, the initial European-American monopoly was broken. From the 1970s on, even the smallest country set great store by having a national airline; only the collapse of Swissair in 2001 ushered in a new trend to privatization and the weakening of national transportation sovereignty. The largest globalization impetus in transportation history took place following the Second World War, especially in and after the sixties, when long-distance air travel ceased to be the preserve of politicians, managers, and wealthy individuals. The technological basis for this was jet propulsion. Since 1958, when the Boeing 707 came into service, and even 1970, when the Boeing 747 inaugurated the “jumbo” format, we have been living in a jet age beyond the dreams of the boldest visionaries of the nineteenth century.

The Railroad as Network Technology

The globalization effect of the railroad was not as great as that of the slightly older steamship. Railroads are systems with narrower spatial limits.
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Technologically they were a complete novelty for which the world was unprepared, whereas the steamship had merged over a period of decades with an older infrastructure of water transportation. When the coal-based technologies arrived, there were already seaports but not yet railroad stations and iron tracks. Once built, however, the railroad was less dependent on climate and the environment; and this greater reliability meant that it could be better tied into production schedules. Only trains could guarantee the regular food supply to large cities and hence their future growth. The railroad was also less risky for the carriage of freight: a shipwreck might spell enormous financial losses, whereas a rail accident seldom destroyed wealth on a major scale, and insurance costs were accordingly lower. The techno-economic complex of the railroad gave rise to the first private companies of giant size that had ever existed: big business was a creature of the railroad.
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Even so, governments often had a great stake in railroad construction—not in Britain, but certainly in Belgium and several German states, and in China and Japan. There were also mixed forms, as in the Netherlands, where it became clear after several decades of experimentation that private initiative alone would not bring about an integrated network. Only special legislation in 1875 established a state railroad system, the organization of which—as well as its operational regulations—was brought over almost entirely from Germany.
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It is debatable what should be understood by a route
network
. Especially in the non-European world, there were various branch lines unconnected to anything else: for example, the Yunnan line built by the French between the Northern Vietnamese port of Haiphong and the terminus in the Chinese provincial capital Kunming. In Africa such branch terminal lines were the rule rather than the exception. Only in the south of the continent was there a two-dimensional network, which by the time it was completed in 1937 ran from the Cape up to the copper belt of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).
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The Trans-Siberian Railroad, despite a number of feeder lines, was and is a solitary arrow through the landscape. East of Omsk it served only strategic purposes, did not carry migrants on a large scale, and opened up no economic hinterland. There was a network in European Russia, but not in Siberia. In China, where railroad construction was continuous after 1897, a number of desirable and feasible stretches never left the drawing board for decades, so that the country had to make do with a fragmentary network with many loose ends, especially in the mountainous country south of the Yangtze.
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Some parts of the interior were added only in the later twentieth century, Tibet only in 2006. In the case of Syria and Lebanon, where the railroads run by French companies had a different gauge from the Ottoman ones, two systems operated alongside each other with no points of contact.
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Not everything that looks at first like a network holds up as one on closer inspection.