Railways and International Politics: Paths of Empire, 1848-1945 (review)

The editors of this book open the introduction with an astonishing claim: "With the railway came the modern age. The advent of the railway had a greater and more immediate impact than any other technological or industrial innovation before or since" (p. 1). What this collection of essays actually shows is how much railways once occupied the attention of European diplomats and strategists, rather than how important they actually were in international relations and warfare.

Of the ten essays in this volume, three deal with railways in industrializing states: Germany, Russia, and Switzerland. The importance of railways in the first weeks of World War I is well known; in his essay on railroads and the Prussian army, Dennis Showalter traces that role backward to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Prussian army's fascination with railroads began. Anthony Heywood's essay on European Russia deals with two rival projects within European Russia and the infighting within the Russian government that delayed their construction before 1914. Neville Wylie's essay on Swiss trans-Alpine railway lines in World War Two is a major contribution to the history of the German-Italian alliance. All three essays discuss the strategic aspects of railways in the context of the commercial, industrial, bureaucratic, and engineering matrix in which they were built.

Not so the other essays, which involve European powers and Japan scheming to build or take over lines in nonindustrial regions as classic examples of peripheral imperialism. Here, since most of the railroads were not actually built, the emphasis is on strategic and diplomatic considerations, with scant regard for potential commercial value or engineering challenges.

F. R. Bridge situates the Sanjak of Novibazar railway project within the complex maneuvering between Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, and Turkey for dominance of the Balkans. Likewise, in Nigel Bailey's essay, British strategists discussed the possibilities of connecting India, China, and Singapore by railways across Burma and Siam. In T. G. Otte's essay on China, Britain and Germany squabbled over the right to build a railway between Tianjin and the Yangtze Valley. John Fisher's essay on Persia and Central Asia and Keith Neilson's on the Baghdad-to-Haifa line depict railways as pawns in the "great game" between Russia and Britain.

All of these essays on the imperialism of railway planning are based on the diplomatic archives of the imperial powers, especially Great Britain. Not surprisingly, they see the world through the eyes of diplomats and strategists, not those of engineers or businessmen. Only one essay, that by Martin Thomas on the pilgrim traffic in Arabia, presents the perspective of indigenous peoples and polities. The others leave the reader with the feeling of having heard only half the story.

Like all collections of essays, this one is uneven; most historians will find only a few essays of interest. More regrettably, this book cries out for maps to situate the places—many of them quite obscure—mentioned in the text. This defect is inexcusable in a short book (243 pages) costing $125.00.