Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Osterhammel, J. The Transformation of The World. Cap. XIV, Pág. 710-724
Osterhammel, J. The Transformation of The World. Cap. XIV, Pág. 710-724
Jürgen Osterhammel
Translated by Patrick Camiller
Networks
Extension, Dcnsity, Hales
7rn
Networks 711
'J, then the period from roughly 1860 to 1914 wimessed a remarkable surge
Iobalization. We have already d1scussed two examples: 1uterconnnental m1-
tion and the expansion of colonial empires. 1 This chapter will consider other
al aspects that emerged here and there: transportation, communications,
e, and finance,
0
think in terms of networks was a nineteenth-century development. 2 In rhe
nreenth cenmry the English physician William Harvey discovered the body
'a-- circulatory system, and in the eighteenth century the French doctor and
ysiocratic" theorist Fran<;ois Quesnay applied this model to economy and
·ery.3The next stage was the network. In 1838 the politician andscholar Fried-
List mapped out a railroad web-a "national transportation systern" -for
whole ofGermany: it was a bold vision of the future. Before 1850, however, it
,- not possible to speak of a railroad network in any European country. Fried-
List proposed the fundamental planning schema, and when the railroads
ré actually in place certain critics took up the web image and presented them
<a-dangerous spider stretched out over its victims. Later, the web carne to stand
ra way ofvisualizing a city, competing for a time with "labyrinth" or, especially
Che United States, with "grid." The self-image of societies as networks thus has
, -roots in the nineteenth century, even if the full range of meanings-up to
'day's "social networks" -appeared only rnuch later.
\ Perhaps the strongest everyday experience of a network, and al so of depen-
rtce on functioning networks Hable to break down, carne with the linking
homes to centrally managed systems: water from a tap, gas from a pipe,
~ctricity from a cable.4 There was a difference as to the extent to which the
vate sphere was invaded: for instance, between the telegraph, an office 1na-
·,ine that no one put in their living room, and the telephone, which after
;:sldw start became a domestic fixture and an object of privare use. At the
~ginning of rhe twentieth century, only a tiny rninority of the world's pop-
látion was linked to technical systems. "India'' was said to be part of the in-
ational telegraph network, but the great rnass of Indians had no direct
perience of this-even if the influence of systems such as the railroad and
legraph on flows of produces and information also made itself felt indirectly
daily life. Virtual opportunities must be distinguished from rhings that can
tually be achieved. In the 187os it was possible to circumnavigate the globe
_-'-:órth of the Equator by steam-powered means of transport, without porters,
, -_orses, or camels, and without the effort of traveling on foot: London-
üez-Bombay-Calcutta-Hong Kong-Yokohama-San Francisco-New
órk-London. But who undertook this journey, aside from the gentleman
hileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1872; his
,_ odel was the eccentric American businessman George Francis Train, who
'ed to set that record in 1870 and later cut it to sixty-seven days in 1890)
d the American reporter Nellie Bly, who in 1889-90 needed no more than
:·\,enty-two days ?5
712 CHAPTER XIV
Communications
Steamships
In the history of transportation, there is often no way around a mild fo·
technological determinism. New means of transportation do not appear·b·~·
there is a cultural craving for them, but because someone comes up with th~
of creating them. It is another storywhether they then catch on, fall flat, or á;
dowed with special meanings and functions. If we leave aside the towing of
vessels by sheer muscle power, ship travel-unlike land transportation-h-"'"'
ways used nonorganic energyin the forro ofwind andcurrent. Steam powera.
to these possibilities. In two parts of the world-England (with Southern s~
land) and the northeastern United States, both pioneers of industrializatio<·
prior modernization of the transportation landscape worked to the advantag:
the steamship and railroad locomotive. Canal systems had already been laid;
by commercially minded privare landowners eager to increase the value of
land; in England the height of the enthusiasm far canals (also a highly popular
vestment) was reached between 1791and1794· They cteated patt of the detn
that the railroad would meet even better. Indeed, the "canal age" evoked bys
historians stretched into the early part of the railroad age; the two forms oftr
portation parrly competed with each other and part!y linked into wider syste .
By the middle of the nineteenth century, more than 25,000 cargo barges We.:::
operatingon Britain's inland waterways, anda mobile, "amphibious" populat.~ '
of no fewer than 50,000 people, one-third of them employed by large com
nies, lived aboard them. 6 The boats were mainly drawn by horses, whereas in
human traction continued for a long time to perform the backbreaking wor
Until rhe 194º' small ships were hauled upriver by "coolies" through the rapids o
the Upper Yangtze that have now disappeared into the Three Gorges reservoir.·<
Stearnships were too large for the canals of the eighteenth century. But sine:.
they could travel smoothly over still waters, they gave a majar impetus to th~;'.
construction of wider and longer canals. Many a city entered a new phase Q.f-,
development when it was connected to one: New York, for example, after the.:·
opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, or Amsterdarn afi:er the complerion ofthe,·
North Sea Canal in 1876. In the Netherlands, the personal interest of King
William l helped in the creation of a closed canal network far the purposes of
both transportation and water regulation. Its successful completion, thanks to,á'
competent corps of engineers dating back to the time of the French occupatiorti.
meant that rhe country delayed the construction of a railroad system.7 In th~:::
United States, the first railroads were seen as no more than feeders for canal
transportation. In New York State, trains were prohibired until 1851 from carry~·:,::;
ing freight in competition with publicly owned canals. 8 ·.··'
carried its own fuel on board: coal and then increasingly oil, afi:er diese!
if••:n¡,in<:s--inve11ted by the brilliant German engineer, Rudolf Diesel, during rhe
i)ii;., 8 ,, 05 _were introduced into'shipping in the 191os.9 Being able to navigate in-
¡lii¡frpenc!enrly, ir was less ar the merey of the elements than the sailing ship had
and was therefore ideal for travel along coasts, against river currents, or
windless lakes and canals. This new freedom allowed shipping to keep to a
.chcedule for the first time in history; the relations that made up a network be-
dependable and open to calculation. The early impact of the steamship
greatest within the technological and economic heartlands of Europe and
North America: Glasgow saw one arrive every ten minutes in the 183os,10 while
a regular service between Vienna and Budapest, inaugurated in 1826 and taken
ovet in 1829 by the fumous Donaudampfuchif!fahrtsgesellschafi: (one of the lon-
gest words in the German language), had a fleet of seventy-one ships by 1850
for a trip lasting roughly fourteen hours.11 The supply of transportation capacity
interacted with new kinds of demand. Steamship expansion on the Mississippi
and rhe 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 sorne 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 186os on, the Chinese state took
initiatives of its own (later supplemented by privare companies) and success-
fully prevented the establishment of a foreign trading monopoly on the coun-
try's great rivers and coastal strips.12 The competitive advantage ofBritish (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 rnail 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 milirary and mercantile shipbuilding industry had reached world
level, making the country a leading force in cornmercial shipping as well as a top-
class naval power, was both an expression of anda contributory factor in its na-
tional success. 13 Everywhere else in Asia (the same is true ofLatin America) new
relations of technological and economic dependence were visible in the control
that foreign shipping lines had over overseas trade. lt is characteristic that the
Tata steel family in India, otherwise highly successful, failed in their attempt to
open upa shipping route to Japan, largely because ofBritish competition.14 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.
714 CHAPTER XIV
The first ocean steamship lines carne in to operation across the North Atl
The technological advances during the first half of the nineteenth century
so great that the journey time of fourteen days between Bristol and New ::Ü.
airead y possible by midcentury, stood virtual] y unchallenged duringthe néx(
decades. 15 The beginning of the great migration to the New World then creá{
passenger demand of novel proportions. The same was not true of other par
the globe, where, as in India, subsidized mail steamers became the driving
of maritime expansion. No imperial or colonial power thought it could affor
do without its own postal service between the mother country and its ove;:
possessions. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 triggered a further g~o·:·,.
of passenger transportation between Europe and Asia, while rhe shipping.liÍi
also did a roaring trade in tropical exports. Although, thanks to its huge intfr
market, the United States rose afi:er midcentury to become the largest shipp;
nation in the world, Britain hung on to its leading position in overseas trfüS
tation. In 1914 it still accounted for 45 percent of world con1mercial tonn' ·,
followed by Germany (u percent) and the United States (9 percent).Japan
reached 3.8 percent, just behind France (4.2 percent) but in front of rhe Neth
lands (3.2 percent) that had dorninated the seas in the seventeenth century.w::.::
World maritime trade should not be thought of asan evenly connected-nt/
work; it did not embrace vast regions such as northern Asia (which acquired·":
ice-free port only in 1860 with the founding ofVladivostok on the Pacific coáf
By the criterion of seagoing tonnage, the world's four main ports in 1888 .We ·
London, New York, Liverpool, and Hamburg. Hong Kong~the gateway to
Chinese rnarket and a major transhipment center for Southeast Asia-trall
behind in seventh place, but it was already far ahead of any other Asian pori.
The major shipping routes were: (1) fromJapan and Hong Kong to the Atlanti
and North Sea ports, via the Strait ofMalacca (Singapore), the northern lndi:f
Ocean, Red Sea, Suez Canal, and Straits of Gibraltar; (2) from Australia to th
Cape of Good Hope and then along the African West coast to Europe; (i) fr~~:
New York to London and Liverpool (the widest shipping Jane of ali); (4) fronl.
Europe to Rio de Janeiro and the River Plate ports; and (s) across the Pacifit'
from San Francisco and Seattle to Yokohama, the leading port ofJapan.18 Th.us~·
alrhough world shipping had a presence here and there in the remotest Pacifrc.:
islands by 1900, it displayed a high degree of geographical concentration.
The sector itselfwas also highly concentrated. Thiswas rhe great age of the pi.i.:,
vate shipping companies (the state, despite a fin-de-siecle enrhusiasm for "naváI
power," was much less involved rhan in the railroads), and sorne were amongth.~·
best capitalized joint stock corporations in the world. Their hallmarks were rég:i
ularity and punctuality, good service across a range of price categories, and safetf' .
standards which-despite sorne spectacular accidents, such as rhe sinkingofthé
Titanic offNewfoundland on April 14, 1912--would have been scarcely imagiO:;.
able in the age of the sailing ship, or even in the early decades of steamship tra-V --,
The major companies, such as the Holland-America Lijn, Norddeutscher Lloy ·
11:
~'2lt~:-
.j0]-lamburg-Amerika-Linie (or HAPAG), Cunard, Alfred Holt, or and Peninsula
Networks 715
li!& Oriental Line, embodied at. one and t~e same ti~e a capi~alis~ w!t~. glo.bal
~;r ach, a high level of technolog1cal perfect1on, and cla1ms to superior c1vil1zat1on
~::-~~sociated with sophisticated travel. The luxurious "swimrning palaces" (a pop-
~~ lar advertising cliché) became emblematic of the last three decades before the
~;~írst World War.19 From the 186os on, nacional rivalry amongthe great shipping
lz'',Jines was repeatedly offset by the shating out ofmarkets and cartel-like "shipping
iÉ'.>conferences" that served to hold prices steady.
¡¡;_ A]rhough world shipping under northwestern European and North Ameri-
~-;-'.' can control included ali coastal regio ns between the 4oth parallel south and the
i; 50 mparallel north in its global timetable, this was still not a truly global ttans-
- -~- - portation network if measured against che airline yardstick of the last quarter of
-:: ' _rhe twentieth century. 20 Only air travel would overcome the rifi: between land
- and sea, operating between airports most of which are located inland. Virtually
no large city in today's world lies outside rhe air network, and the frequency
of contact is infinitely greater than ir was in the heyday of passenger shipping.
Moreover, the initial European-American monopoly was broken. From the
197 os on, even the smallest counrry set great store by having a national airline;
only rhe collapse of Swissair in 2001 ushered in a new trend to privatization and
the weakening of national transportation sovereignty. The largest globalization
imperus in transportation history took place following the Second World War,
especially in and afi:er 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 carne into
service, and even 1970, when the Boeing 74 7 inaugurated the "jumbo" formar,
we have been living in a jet age beyond the dreams of the boldest visionaries of
che nineteenth century.
'>France, Germany, ltaly, and Austria-Hungary, and by the end of the cenmry in
rest of Europe. The spread of technology across borders_ meant that it was
difficult for a country tó go its own Way, the only partial exception being
George Stephenson, the "father" of the railroad, laid clown a norm
8.5 inches, which was also adopted elsewhere because ofBritain's tech-
'.ffc'rtolo~icai dominance in the field. The Netherlands, Baden, and Russia initially
''ºº"~ for a wider gauge, but in the end only Russia held out. By 19w, with only
one short interruption to switch gauges, people could travel by train all the way
from Lisbon to Beijing. In the same year, the transcontinental network also em-
braced Korea, where a railroad boom had started around 1900. This completed
rhe unification ofEurasia in terms of railroad technology.
The Railroad and National lntegration
The new "iron horse;' initially competing with the fastest mail coaches ever
put into operation, 29 offered a novel experience of the swiftly passing country-
side and sparked debate about the desirability of the rnodernity that it seemed
to epitomize. 30 It brought about the need and the chances of a new kind of spa-
tial politics. 31 In France the "railroad question" became a central tapie of elite
discussions in the forties, and it was only in che face of great resistance, mainly
from Catholic conservatives, that the new invention was held to serve che coun-
try's prosperity. 32 When the railroad later appeared in ocher parts of the world
and unleashed similar reactions, people in Europe had long forgotten cheir early
fears and held up backward, superstirious Orientals as figures of fon. The first
project in China, the ten-mile Wusong railroad near Shanghai, was dismantled
in 1877, just a year after its completion, because the local population feared it
would destroy the harmony of natural forces (fing shui). This was ridiculed in
the West as a primitive defense against che modern world. Yet it took only a few
more years for the Chinese to understand che desirability of the railroad, and
in the early years of the twentieth century patriotic members of che provincial
upper classes collected large sums of rnoney to buy back railroad concessions
from foreigners. In 1911, an atternpt by che imperial government to develop a
centralized European-style railroad policy became the rnost irnportant factor in
the fall of the Qing dynasty. Regional and central forces fought for control ovet
amodern technology that offered handsome profits to Chinese as well as foreign
financiers and suppliers. In China, che railroad wrote history on a grand scale.
At that time, not long after its late entry into the railroad age, China was
already capable of building and running its own subsysterns of a nacional
network. Until then rnost of the railroads, though under Chinese govern-
ment ownership, had been funded by overseas capital and built by foreign
engineers. An early major exception was the technically difficult stretch from
Beijing to Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), whose completion in 1909, entirely devised
and implemented by Chinese engineers, linked the state railroad system to the
caravan trade from Mongolia. Foreign experts recognized it as an impressive
718 CHAPTER XIV
feat, achieved at relatively low cost; the rolling stock, however, was not
in China. Thereafter, any railway built with Chinese capital made a po.·f
dispensingwith non-Chinese engineers. 33 _:":·
t>
%+· In Europe, governments ensured that railroad policywas conducted in che na-
~:·· donal interese. Por a whole century the railroads were a focus ~f rivalry between
;.Jrance and Germany,39 and their significance for troop mobilizations played a
:· ·Wajor role in conflict scenarios prior to the First World War. In large pares of che
Y·. world, however-Latin America (except Argentina, which had a large network
cenrered on Buenos Aires), Central Asia, and Africa-the train never hadas
i'?:.'great an impact on society as ir did in western Europe, che United States, India,
• or Japan. Traditional forms of travel (walking, cart, or caravan) went unchal-
lenged for a long time and had many advantages over the more expensive and in-
flexible railroad. Asian or African societies that had for good reason always been
wheel-less remained so for the time being.40 Indeed, it was not unusual for these
regions to skip the railroad age, passing directly from human or animal motive
power to che all-terrain vehicle and propeller-driven aircrafi:. Where railroads ex-
isted, their integrative effect sometimes remained weak because of the looseness
0 [ connections with rivers, canals, and highways. Tsarist transportation policy
wagered everything on the train afi:er the 186os, but it neglected to construct
paved feeder roads. The age-old impenetrability of rhe Russian and Siberian
wastes rherefore changed litde, and huge regional variations in transport costs
were asure sign of che low level of integration.41
Nor was there a lack of political e:ffects. The telegraph increased the p·r.
not only on diplomats serving abroad but also on cabinets and other deC':
making bodies in capital cities. The response time in international cris
shorter, and major conferences did not last so long. Encrypted message.(
be wrongly decoded or give rise to a misunderstanding. Military headqua
and embassies were soon supplied with telegraphists, who went around"~
cumbersome codebooks vulnerable to espionage. The fear that someone ·~;
read confidential messages, or that the code might be cracked, was not al:<
unfounded.57 Such concerns cast a shadow over communications, and··::.
opportunities-some hard to put into practice-opened up for censorship;':
Hierarchy and Subversion in Telegraphy
The fact that the new medium was predominantly British-as teleph ·,·
would later be Americ,an-had a certain influence on its military and polir.;.
uses. By 1898 two-thirds of relegraph lines in the world were British own'
either by the Eastern Telegraphy Company and other state-licensed compari'
or direcrly by the Crown, US cables trailed behind in second place, while.G
many accounted for just 2 percent of the total. Alongside the 156,000 kilomet
belonging to British firms, a mere 7,800 were in the hands of rhe state-m ··,"·
in India. (Altogether, barely more than one-tenth of all lines in the world v/'
directly controlled by governments.58) In other words, in terms of commuiü
tion, rhe British Empire with its public and privare representatives acted·a
kind ofhegemonic master empire with others partly dependent on it. Howe~.~1·
fears that Britain would use its quasi-monopoly to spy on others orto establi~
a communicative stranglehold were not borne out. Even rhe British were·.Ii~:··
invariably successful in maintaining control. Shortly befo re the First World Wá
Americans owned more and more cables in rhe North Atlanric.
It soon became clear that access to the network would have to be carefu
regulared. During the Crimean War, when the medium was deployed for th
first time, British and French cornmanders found themselves bombarded wiflJ.
a welrer of contradictory telegrarns from civilian politicians. 59 In this respeéll
rherefore, telegraphy tended to creare new hierarchies rarher than a level playing ·
field. Only top officials permitted themselves access to it, and of course ir beca.ro;
much easier to direct rhe course of negoriations abroad from headquarters in th.
mother country. 60 The age of the grand diplomacy of unencumbered plenipotell~··
tiaries was drawing to a clase.
On rhe other hand, autonomy might assume a new awkwardness-if en~:.
forced in situations when rhe cable connection failed or, as often happened:~
in wartime, was literally severed. In September 1898, when British and Frenc.h'
troops met near Fashoda in rhe Sudan in one of the most famous "duels" in im~:;
perial history (the adversaries acrually drank a borde of champagne wirh ea~'
other), General Kitchener had access to che telegraph via Omdurman, whil,
his French counterpart Majar Marchand was denied it. The British used thi~:
Networks 723
and in 1924 the need for international regulation was made explicit at the.S'
World Energy Conference.
2 Trade