This chapter discusses the resilience of caravans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by suggesting a move from competition and technologies-focused narratives to more comprehensive histories of mobility. The aim is not to deny the transformative effects of steam and, later, automobiles. It rather promotes a synergy approach in which speed was not systematically the decisive factor and the experience of mobility and the ‘channelling’ (V. Huber) was not yet an unescapable feature. Geography, season, markets’ specific features provided economic rationality to slow, incremental and yet efficient type of mobility. As suggested by the intertwined histories of the chapter, this did not influence economic calculations only. The persistence of caravan trade and its connection to a widening array of means of mobility also had an influence on the very working of inland territories from urban settlements along caravan routes to the cities’ daily connections with the steppe and desert.

That the industrial innovations which ushered in the modern economy made their appearance first in Britain has often been understood in relation to economic “factors” such as wage rates, size of work force, and cost of labor and materials, capable of being compared over a variety of situations. But the historiographical field created by this literature is a jumble of opposing claims. While it may be possible to show that certain of these factors contributed to economic growth in particular situations, the transformation that began in Britain in the 1760s was a unique historical event. Any of these factors that may have contributed to it only did so by operating in that specific time and place. We need therefore an account that focuses on what made Britain a fertile site for such a transformation and then on the actors who effected it. The chapter stresses two such determinants, first the overall economic development that gave Britain an unparalleled national market and connections to international ones, and second, a “culture of science” within which technical innovation was encouraged. Both these domains developed a high degree of autonomy by the eighteenth century, and James Watt emerged at the intersection of them.

Although France and Germany would acquire modern industrial economies after 1850, neither was in a position to do so even a few decades earlier. Only the coming of railroads would give either country the kind of national market that was so important in Britain. The same was true for science in France, but not in Germany, for reasons that had to do with the same fragmentation that kept its economy traditional. The impact of railroad construction made up for that absence in making economic transformation possible, so that organizing spheres in accord with principles derived from the activities carried on within them would come as a concomitant of industrial transformation rather than a precondition for it. Its most striking expression would be the organization of national professional organizations, dedicated to giving doctors, engineers, chemists, and academic researchers control over their own domains, and providing essential services for modern industrial societies.

Chapter 8 investigates several aspects of low-road market capitalism across regions of the United States. It tackles Black soldier protest and military discipline, the post-Civil War sale of guns and munitions, and the development of railroads as a physical and economic vehicle for the dispersal of violence in the United States. Labor strikes, the Panic of 1873, and the centrality of the federal governmment to the interests of industrial capitalism are prominent features of this chapter.

The growth the the coffee economy, sugar production in the Northeast and the growth of industry

The population of Czarist Russia roughly tripled between 1850 and 1914. Keynes conjectured that this “excessive fecundity” contributed to the revolutions of 1917–18. In Russia as in contemporary India, however, population grew largely because the growing railroad network alleviated local famine. The growth and routing of the railways were determined chiefly by military considerations, hence can be regarded as exogenous. The railroads also allowed the opening of new lands and greater regional and national specialization: Russian grain exports quintupled between 1850 and 1914, foreign investment poured in, and millions of peasants moved temporarily into urban industry during months of slack farmstead demand. Hence a population explosion that would ordinarily have reduced wages and living standards was instead accompanied by rapid economic growth, per capita income almost tripling in the sixty years before 1914. The regions not serviced by railways, however, stagnated or declined; and, controlling for other factors, regional railway access correlates negatively with peasant unrest. Not rapidly growing population, but uneven development, appears most associated with rebellion.

The “civilizing mission” gave the French their most coherent explanation of empire since mercantilism. The Third Republic would return France to the front rank of Great Powers through an expanding empire rooted in republican values and capitalist economic development. Evolving race theory provided new means of legitimizing hierarchical difference. Settler republicanism deepened its roots in Algeria, even as European immigration began to decline. The republican imperial agenda dovetailed conveniently with geopolitics in the “scramble for Africa,” leading to the formation of two colonial federations, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, each much larger than the Hexagon itself. The agents of republican empire were largely the same as previous incarnations—colonial officials, military officers, missionaries, and capitalists. The “civilizing mission” produced varied results, not least because of the parsimony of the bourgeois regime. Republican schools trained both collaborators and future anti-colonial and postcolonial elites. Railroads built at a horrendous cost in blood and indigenous treasure unified parts of the empire. In the Indochinese Union, the French sought to construct a gateway to influence in Asia that would rival that of British India. Through a state-driven regime of extraction, the Indochinese Union became financially self-sustaining.

As state and local governments moved into the infrastructure field, they also revolutionized public finance and set the stage for infrastructure politics in the twentieth century. Governments at every level broadened their fiscal footprints to accommodate new infrastructure development after the Civil War. Governments were not supposed to direct public money into private hands, but this legal principle was in inevitable conflict with the public–private model of infrastructure development. In any event, state governments created numerous workarounds, most notably by allowing cities to tax and spend instead of states doing it themselves. Finally, the Civil War fundamentally changed the balance of power between federal and state governments. The 14th Amendment seemed to promise a new era of expanded rights for black Americans and other groups against discriminatory state power. As public power spread like a web over economic life, conservative jurists such as Ernst Freund, Christopher Tiedemann, Thomas Cooley, and others asked whether there were any limits at all on government power to advance what legislatures called “the public good.” Their views would inform laissez-faire legalism from its rise after the Civil War until its demise in the 1930s.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Reconstruction followed the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. Under President Andrew Johnson, presidential reconstruction was favorable to the defeated slaveowners. When Johnson was impeached and then defeated in the polls, Radical Republicans in Congress took over Reconstruction. They were not radical enough to give freedmen 40 acres and a mule, and their efforts to reform Southern state governments were only temporary. President Grant tried to help freedmen, but Republicans transferred their interest from the violent South to the expanding West.

Modern means of transportation and communication along water, rails, and roads had a profound impact on the economic and social development of China from the mid-nineteenth century onward. After the arrival of the steamship in the 1840s and the telegraph in the early 1860s, railroad construction began to emerge slowly at the close of the century, followed by bus and motor traffic bringing about macadamized city streets and highway expansion, with a modest level of air traffic taking off in the 1930s. This chapter addresses the structural changes in transportation and communication that characterized the transition from the last decades of the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican period (1911–1949) to the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Chapter 1 details the multiple problems the Austro-Hungarian monarchy faced in the First World War: fiscal challenges and ethnic problems resulting from eleven different nationalities residing within the Dual Monarchy. A depiction of Conrad von Hoetzendorf and his disastrous military plans and defeats, as well as Emperor Franz Joseph, Alois Berchtold. It emphasizes the inferior training of the Habsburg Army, its obsolete weaponry and lack of consistent and adequate training. Lack of a central command, ethnic concerns and complicated reserve system.

Chapter 2 tracks the early stages of what I call embedded industrialization based on waterpower and increased use of biomass. After mid-century, an increasing number of industries and regions of the country mechanized manufacturing and mining with wood-burning steam engines in addition to waterpower. The state-promoted construction of a vast railroad network in the 1880s further accelerated industrialization. By the late 1880s, embedded industrialization and long-established activities, particularly silver mining, began approaching ecological limits to growth. The most easily accessible forests dwindled at alarming rates and no more rivers could be harnessed for waterpower. Embedded industrialization also faced social constraints: peasant communities clashed with factories and railroads over water and wood. The increased strain on non-fossil energy sources motivated Mexico’s state and economic elites to search for new ways to power industry. Due to its prestige and connection to European and US industrialization, coal became the favored alternative.

Chapter 3 examines Mexico’s transition to coal between the 1880s and the 1910s. State officials, newspapermen, and industrialists viewed coal as crucial to becoming a modern and prosperous nation. Mounting concerns over rampant deforestation from embedded industrialization and railroad expansion prompted Mexican conservationists to promote coal as a way of protecting the nation’s forests. In response, the Mexican state surveyed its territory and discovered the largest deposits along the Mexico–US border. By combining domestic production and imports, Mexico’s economy partially shifted to coal. Coal would play the role of “energy bridge” between embedded and oil-based industrialization.

Chapter 4 shows how state power and industrial interests turned oil into Mexico’s most important energy source in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1890s, Mexico imported US crude and refined it domestically to be used as a source of artificial illumination and industrial lubricant. Reliance on imported oil ended when domestic production on a commercial scale began after 1901. By 1921, Mexico was the second largest oil producer in the world after the USA, representing one-quarter of total global output that year. By the 1930s, Mexico’s electricity generation, industries, and transportation (railroads and motor vehicles) largely relied on oil. By mid-century, the majority of energy consumed in Mexico was derived from oil and increasing amounts of natural gas (typically mixed with oil in underground deposits).