Chapter 3 demonstrates how James uses railway journeys to dramatize the potentially endless and inherently sociable principle of narrative relations that he outlines in his Preface to Roderick Hudson. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The American Scene, I argue that these texts evince a particular concern with ‘stopping-places’, specifically invoking the railway’s associations with distribution and supply. In The Sacred Fount, relationships operate in ways that suggest the railway’s own temporal and alimentary economy, as the train journey opening the novel tropes a continuing disquiet surrounding social contact, as well as providing a context for its central concern about the transfer of ‘resources’. The second half of the chapter examines the representation of similar anxieties throughout The American Scene. From his seat in the Pullman railcar, James is perturbed by the sense of moving ‘without personal effort or suffered transfer’, associating the Pullman’s innovative continuity, in particular, with the difficulty of social and cultural differentiation. In essays like ‘The Future of the Novel’ James deprecates the railway’s role as an arbiter of literary and critical taste.

Nancy Henry examines the mid-century coexistence of trains and horses and argues that horses became industrialised, machine-like commodities as they entered a new place in the cultural imagination. Railway construction in the 1840s meant that by the 1850s novelists recognised the coexistence of train and horse travel and raised questions about their economic and physical dependence on both mechanical and animal forms of power. The number of horses actually increased dramatically during the railway age as horses were needed to access stations and to carry freight to be loaded onto trains, and this led to an increasing number of accidents which figured as the focus of anxieties about risk, danger, and the unexpected. Henry observes a tipping point in the relationship between the Victorians and progress that manifests in this case in fictional narratives of travel accidents that generated plots of financial loss, disfigurement, and death.

What was the effect of war outcomes on key indicators of state formation in a post-war phase? In this chapter I demonstrate that victors and losers of war were set into different state capacity trajectories after war outcomes were revealed. I do this using a set of cutting-edge causal inference techniques to analyse the gap in state capacity that was generated between winners and losers in the time-period of most stringent warfare (1865-1913). After substantiating that the outcomes of these wars were determined by exogenous or fortuitous events, I provide a short description of my treatment—i.e., defeat—and outcomes—i.e., total revenues and railroad mileage as key indicators of state infrastructural capacity. My estimator, a difference-in-differences model, shows defeat had a negative long-term impact on state capacity which remains remarkably robust even after relaxing key assumptions. Finally, I use the synthetic control method to estimate how state capacity in Paraguay and Peru would have evolved in a counterfactual world where these countries were spared the most severe defeats in late nineteenth-century Latin America.

Chapter 8 traces the EU governance of transport services from the Treaty of Rome to the new economic governance (NEG) regime adopted by the EU after the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, European public sector advocates were able to shield transport from commodification, but, over time, the Commission gradually advanced a commodification agenda one transport modality after another. Sometimes, however, the Commission’s draft liberalisation laws encountered enduring resistance and recurrent transnational protests by transport workers, leading the European Parliament and Council to curb the commodification bent of the Commission’s draft directives. After 2008 however, NEG provided EU executives with new means to circumvent resistance. Despite their country-specific methodology, all qualitative NEG prescriptions on transport services issued to Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania pointed towards commodification. But the more the Commission succeeded in commodifying transport services, the more the nature of counter-mobilisations changed. Accordingly, the European Transport Workers’ Federation’s Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiative no longer targeted vertical EU interventions, but rather the social dumping pressures created by the horizontal free movement of services and fellow transport workers. This target made joint transnational collective action more difficult.

September 1830 saw the first purpose-built passenger railway open between Manchester and Liverpool, followed by a proliferation of local, national, and international lines. Yet the integration of railway infrastructures, perspectives, and plotlines into writing was slow. This chapter examines terminology, speculative journalism, and early engagement with railways in fiction to demonstrate how writing across genres extended the emergent ‘railway imaginary’ well beyond the scope of its built referent. Yet gaps in spatial and temporal perception opened up by the railways posed a challenge to those plotting long-form fiction that relied on a sense of momentum towards a definitive ending. While selected works, including the Mechanics’ Magazine, Railroadiana, and The Pickwick Papers, stop short of representing railways as an inhabited system closely entangled with the familiar rhythms of 1830s life, they do take seriously the task of establishing a dynamic relationship between railway and narrative form that matched technological and literary ambition alike.

Spa towns experienced a boom with the creation of rail lines that brought tourists to the resorts. These customers, beckoned by the climate and environment, sought healthful cures and leisurely activities. Resorts like those crafted by François Blanc at Bad Homburg and Monte Carlo exploded in part because they offered gambling, but they also grew because they were able to take advantage of the mechanization of travel in the mid-nineteenth century that developed in tandem with a culture of tourism. Industrialized transportation networks promoted industrialized forms of leisure even as they gestured to healthful living.

Describes the rationale for, and approach to, regulation of the rail industry. Considers the effects of restructuring, horizontal and vertical separation policies, and the experience of Ramsey pricing

Public engagement with the twin scandals associated with the railways was much more direct, as most of the victims were ordinary citizens. These individuals shared their experiences by writing eyewitness accounts of crashes, or of approaches made by speculative stags, in letters to the press. Some of the newspapers that published these letters of protest were themselves caught up in the politics of the ‘railway interest’, occasionally engaging in internecine warfare through statements written by their editors. And Sir Robert Peel, whose government was responsible for the control of the railways, was prepared to address the nation directly, if anonymously, by drafting text for a Times leading article in a letter to his chancellor of the exchequer.

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, however, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices.

In March 1887 Robert Germond, a missionary in charge of a small mission station at Thabana Morena on the western border of present-day Lesotho, reported sad news. Basutoland, he wrote, ‘produces less and finds no outlet for its products. Its normal markets, Kimberley and the Free State, purchase Australian and colonial wheat … Basutoland, we must admit, is a poor country … Last year’s abundant harvest has found no outlet for, since the building of the railway, colonial and foreign wheat have competed disastrously with the local produce.’1

Thabana Morena is about 330 kilometres from Kimberley. Then part of the British protectorate of Basutoland, the region was the breadbasket of the South African interior. Basotho farmers produced grain for the rapidly growing local markets of Griqualand West, a division of the Cape Colony whose major town was Kimberley, and the Orange Free State, one of the two Boer republics set up in the 1850s after the Great Trek.

In Chapter 4, the book turns to the involvement of foreign bankers and financiers in Chinese railway development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the chapter focusses on the loan negotiations for the financing of the railway connecting Tianjin in northern China and Pukou in China’s south between 1898 and 1910. These loan negotiations were mainly undertaken by representatives of German and British financial groups in China and Chinese officials. By exploring the interaction between these foreign and Chinese negotiators, the chapter highlights the important role the ’contact zone’ and transnational networks played on the Chinese frontier in the foreign financing of Chinese railways. The chapter also shows how Chinese negotiators exhibited substantial agency within such transnational networks and were able to win very favourable loan terms. More generally, the chapter shows how these transnational financial networks reflected the development of financial globalization during the early twentieth century, connecting local officials in China with markets and individual investors in Europe.