Download Conclusion: Railways and Informal Empire

Conclusion: Railways and
Informal Empire
Ronald E. Robinson
Any simple Eurocentric notion of railway imperialism must fade in light of
these chapters on its workings. They show that railway contracts agreed
among proto-nationalists, capitalists, and imperialists spread informal imperial influence and integrated countries into the international economy;
but more surprising is how often their divergent interests operated at cross
purposes and generated anti-imperial as well as imperial effects. The outcome was usually out of European control; it depended largely on the railway-building country's ability to adapt its structural organization to the
locomotive's requirements. It was this extra-European factor more often
than not, that made the difference between integrating and disruptive el
leets and governed the balance of imperial affiliation and alienation in each
rase. Accordingly, several different types of railway imperialism emerge
Irom these experimental studies.
The overlap of pro to-national, imperial, and financial interests in building
railways was naturally at its greatest in the self-governing colonies of British
North America and Australasia. At first sight, it is not easy to see why these
v i r t u a l l y autonomous states, with their democratically elected ministries and
parliaments, should have remained loyal to the empire. After previous experience with American colonial rebels, the Imperial Government too\e
In avoid the folly of coercing them at the expense of a defeated recomjuest.
K i n s h i p and cultural bonds with the m o t h e r country played a par!, though
inanv Irish, Seots, and Kreneh Canadians did not share this s e n t i m e n t ; all
Hie colonies relied on the empire for their external defense in occasional
emergencies but, from day to day, they knew their bread was buttered with
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Railway Imperialism
British trade and investment. Depending almost entirely on the United
Kingdom for their export market and on London for their long-run capital,
they were bound up with empire in tacit alliances of free trade and free
institutions. It is not surprising that the wheat merchants of Toronto and
Montreal and the sheep barons and wool factors of Sydney and Melbourne*
took their loyalist politics from the imperial export-import sector; what IN
surprising is that nationalistic colonial politicians and their parochial-minded
constituents did much the same. But then, British loans were vital to set
colonial capital and labor at work, and the fortunes of colonial factions huntf
on bringing new lands into production and stimulating prosperity. Some* of
the most effective affiliations turning their parish pump politics in favor of
the imperial connection centered in joint railway ventures.
The autonomy of the North American colonies, however, was unique in
one respect; unlike those in South Africa and Australasia, they had an al
ternative to Great Britain as a trading partner and lender next door in llin
United States. Indeed, they did more business across the undefended honlri
than they did with Liverpool and London, and yet, fearing the pull of I lie
Great Republic more than imperial domination, they chose to exclude Amei
ican capital and relied on the imperial connection with the City of London
to win the best of both worlds.
As Dr. Roman's analysis of Anglo-Canadian negotiations suggests, I lit*
British Government used railway imperialism to strengthen colonial alln
giance whenever annexation to the United States threatened. After the ah
olition of colonial trade preference in British markets a midcentury had NP|
the St. Lawrence merchants agitating to join the United States, the Imperial
Government offered financial guarantees for an intercolonial railroad, A«l
mittedly, it would not pay its way and its strategic value was dubious; III
reviving British investment in the slump-ridden colony it would howevei,
bind up the fraying imperial connection with the self-governing Canadian
province and draw it into closer union with the maritime colonies.
Railway-building at the risk or cost of the British Exchequer was I IIP
exception rather than the rule in self-governing colonies. Even with Mil
imperial guarantee, it was difficult to match terms agreeable to the Hi I I l u l l
Parliament with those acceptable to colonial assemblies, as the pinlon^n!
haggling over the intercolonial guarantees subsequently showed. Siner (lift
colonies guaranteed the capital invested in the great majority of line* Ml M
fixed interest on the security of their own revenue, it was the rnlonlnl
parliamentarians who decided where they should go. These railroads thi'l*
fore, were bound to be colonial political projects first and foremost. Tli*y
were designed above all to assemble the coalitions of sectional lnleit<«U
required for a majority approval of their financing in loeal legislating A
proposal for a railway in Professor Creighton's brilliant phrase, "was Ilki* A
mediaeval cargo which had to pay tribute to every robber baron alonK ( J I M
Conclusion
177
tiresome trade route to its destination."1 Otherwise, colonial governments
were free to make their contracts with the British private investor.
The imperial and anti-imperial effects of this kind of undertaking are
illustrated in Dr. Roman's account of the Canadian railway boom of the
1850s. London subscribed some £16 million to colonial government loans,
which issued in 2,000 miles of disconnected lines, each serving particular
sections of different colonies. All these railroads lost heavily, but that for
the time being was no matter; although the companies were privately owned,
they were licensed by statutes that ensured colonial government subsidies
to keep them operating. Whatever else this corruptible form of organization
achieved, it provided colonial politicians with a bonanza of patronage until
colonial treasuries ran dry. At elections everyone stood or fell on railway
platforms, and more often than not, empire loyalists succeeded. Trusted by
the British investor as associates of Anglo-Canadian finance, they could be
relied upon to keep the inflow of capital coming. As colonial prosperity
revived, annexationists and radical anti-imperialists gave way in ministries
and assemblies to moderate conservative Macdonalds, Cartiers, Gaits, and
Taches. Their coalitions, combining railway benefits with appeals to local
religious and ethnic communities, mustered on loyalist Canadian principles:
"let there be no looking to Washington; let the cry be with the moderate
party—Canada united in one province under one Sovereign/'2 Under these
circumstances imperial guarantees were unnecessary. London could afford
to leave its tacit alliances to the free play of railway imperialism in colonial
politics.
The lines in which colonial ministers invested by no means promoted
imperial strategy or Canadian unity in other ways. The boom left the unifying
intercolonial project untouched; the tracks laid surely expanded colonial
export business but carried it mainly out of the empire into the railways and
ports of the United States. The Great Western railroad, for example, was
designed as a shortcut through Canada for American traffic from Michigan
lo New York State; the New Brunswick colonial line to St. John was projected
to join the North American railroad in Maine, while the St. Lawrence and
Atlantic from Richmond terminated at Portland, Maine. The British owners
nl I he Grand Trunk built the Toronto-Montreal section chiefly to divert
American traffic from Chicago and Detroit through Canada to Montreal and
Tot (land and planned to extend the Trunk to the West along existing United
Males lines. 3 Looking for payable traffic, most lines of the 1850s ran into
llie United States, with little regard to the all-Canadian east-west axis required for a national system in alliance with the empire. In this instance,
IT. in many others, the rails that served the aims of the private investors and
Milonial politicians well enough swerved away from their imperial duty,
Hiving railway imperialism a free-wheeling momentum of its own.
|usl as llie inflow of railway capital encouraged colonial cooperation with
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Railway Imperialism
the empire, so risks of anti-imperial reactions emerged when it dried up,
which suggests a cyclic alternation of railway imperial and anti-imperial
effects. Such was the case of Canada in 1858. By this time the "pork barrels"
of the colonial politicians were empty, and mounting subsidies that kept
unpayable political railways operating were bankrupting colonial governments and undermining their credit. Moreover, the Gait tariff of 1856 on
British imports further outraged London investors, although it was the only
hope of paying their dividends; yet without further loans, existing lines could
not be extended to more profitable destinations. If the companies were
allowed to sink and their lines were shut down, the responsible loyalist
politicians would certainly sink with them. Imperial intervention was required, as it had been a decade earlier. Colonial ministers could now agree
in principle with financiers and imperial strategists in London; the salvaging
of all their interests hung on the imperial guarantee for the intercolonial
railroad. It promised to save the Grand Trunk, revive Canadian credit, and
restart the flow of private capital. The principals travelled together a great
distance on this train during the next decade, as Dr. Roman's dissection of
their negotiations explains. For its part, the Imperial Government insisted
on no guarantee without colonial confederation. A central railway authority
was surely needed to rationalize uneconomic lines and plan a unified system,
but Montreal and Quebec had little use for the intercolonial project, while
Toronto and Upper Canada had use only for lines opening up the West.
Fears of an American invasion during the Civil War, however, concentrated
minds on both sides of the Atlantic. When the colonists asked for assurances
that the empire would defend them against their intransigent neighbor, the
British could not see how this was to be done, except by sending the navy
to burn down Boston and New York. They also realized that to do so would
be to defend their minor economic stakes in British North America at the
sacrifice of their major interests in the United States. The horrid possibility
spurred even Gladstone to offer generous financial rewards for a Canadian
confederation, provided it organized its own defense, thus reducing the
imperial profile and risks of an Anglo-American confrontation.4
The outcome of the negotiations, in which the colonists exploited the
empire to finance their railroads and the empire exploited loans to press
confederation and strengthen imperial alliances, sums up the role of railway
imperialism in British North America. By 1874 the British Government had
guaranteed loans and grants of some eight million pounds, including three
for the intercolonial and three for a Canadian Pacific railroad. With this
locomotive aid the colonists managed to construct an imperial dominion from
coast to coast along lines that would soon be reorientated into a national
system. They also secured the West from encroaching United States lines
for the benefit of their own subimperial expansion. Without the imperil]
guarantees, the different colonial and sectional interests involved in contriving confederation would probably have been Irreconcilable; certainly
Conclusion
179
Nova Scotia, Upper Canada, British Columbia, and perhaps, New Brunswick
would not have joined. Macdonald, the first premier of the new Confederation wrote,
Until [the Canadian Pacific Railway] is completed our Dominion is little more than
a "geographical expression." We have as much interest in British Columbia as in
Australia, and no more. The railway once finished we become one great united
country with a large inter-provincial trade and a common interest.3
As things turned out, the guaranteed loans cost the British taxpayer nothing.
Once the frame of confederation had restored confidence in 1867, the City
of London was to oversubscribe the loans four times.
Colonial ministers embarked on railway building and railway politics
clearly became financially dependent on London; the City and occasionally
the British Government acted, in effect, as their bank manager, and for as
long as they were clients with mounting overdrafts, they could hardly afford
to disregard the investors' imperial strings or the rules of the imperial game.
The bank manager, on the other hand, was deeply committed to his clients
and their success in the colonial game. If unequal at times, the dependence
was mutual in the long run.
A Canadian confederation anchored to the empire, preempting vast territories to the Pacific for British trade and finance without the expense of
administration, was cheap at the price. At the time of confederation these
colonies were a relatively unimportant asset to the British economy but, the
economic rewards in imperial exports and imports grew rapidly thereafter,
as British railroad investment consolidated the confederation in the drive to
the West and opened wheat production in the prairies, with lines connecting
them to eastern and British markets. Between a half and a third of gross
capital formation in Canada from 1867 to 1914 was financed almost entirely
from London.6 For the first time British North America in the 1900's became
more an economic satellite of the United Kingdom than of the United States.
Such were the workings of railway imperialism in British North America.
The extent of informal empire has been disputed, but so far as it operated
in Canada, it surely steamed along steel rails.
Canada is an outstanding example of a type peculiar to the self-governing
colonies, where railway imperialism reinforced existing alliances of free trade
and free institutions with occasional informal imperial aid. Here locomotives
attracted the most widespread collaborators with the least anti-imperial protest to exert their most powerful integrating effects. Here, the free play of
democratic politics and markets ensured that colonial, financial, and imperial
interests in building lines converged to a greater extent than elsewhere; the
benefits of opening new territories for more British colonists were widely
shared; and with free choices, political and economic structures were more
flexibly adapted to locomotive needs. Colonial governments made their con-
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Railway Imperialism
tracts with British investors on favorable market terms; they controlled and
usually owned the lines constructed; they had to be designed to profit not
only British and local capitalists but to win the votes of farmers and town
workers in many sections of a colony, if parliamentary approval was to bewon.
Railways of this kind normally served the proto-national ambitions of the
colonists and the subimperial expansion of the empire at one and the same
time. For these reasons proto-national, subimperial lines translated comparatively smoothly into colonial collaboration with the expansion of a freetrading, informal empire.
The case of South Africa is, of course, the exception to this rule. Railway
investment in Canada strengthened imperial ties in the end, through its
influence on colonial politics, whereas private British investment in South
Africa ended in strengthening republicanism and overthrowing British paramountcy over the subcontinent. At first sight the contrast seems easily
accounted for, and not only in the presence of an Afrikaner majority among
the colonists. In British North America the bulk of investment in Canadian
lines colonizing the West took place after a federal government to coordinate
the advance had been set up. In South Africa the colonizing lines advanced
northward into a limited area suitable for European settlers, which had been
divided largely into two inland republics and two maritime colonies before
the railway age began. Imperial paramountcy hung chiefly on collaboration
with the overall supremacy of the more mature Cape Colony and on keeping
the republics penned in the interior dependent on colonial ports. Four states
extending their lines into each other's territory in search of traffic were likely
to crack this balkanized frame. Either railway economics would draw them
into some form of railway federation, or their rivalry would bankrupt their
state railways and treasuries and bring them to blows. If it came to that,
imperial paramountcy might not withstand the shock. The outcome, how
ever, was by no means predetermined, as Professor Wilburn's study of
railway imperialism and railway republicanism reveals.
Railway projects had much the same kind of integrating and imperial i/ing
effects in white South African politics up to 1895 as they had had earlier in
Canada. Financial dependence on London for railways encouraged Afrikaner
collaboration with imperial interests. In the Cape Parliament for example,
a mutual interest in the advantages of lines allied Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, tlu<
majority leader of the Cape Dutch farmers, with the English-speaking nil
nority leaders, John Gordon Sprigg and Cecil John Rhodes. The farmer*
wanted connections with local markets; the English could attract the nee
essary railway capital from London; and as local farmers' lines required
government subsidies, it was agreed that Cape trunk lines should be ex
tended to find more profitable traffic in the prospective goldfield marketN
of the Transvaal and Zambezia. By 1889 Hofmeyr's Afrikaner Bond wan
backing Rhodes' imperial railway drive to the North and soon made him
prime minister. Through the Bond's infliienee with farmers' leaders in llic<
Conclusion
181
republics, Hofmeyr persuaded the Orange Free State to admit the Cape
colonial line across its territory to the Vaal River, while the Cape Government, with its superior borrowing power, funded and operated the extension
to the benefit of Orange Free State commercial farming. The Orange republic
was drawn in this way into a railway and customs union with the Cape
Colony. Two years later the Bond helped Rhodes cajole a reluctant but
financially embarrassed Transvaal republic into admitting the line to the
traffic of the Johannesburg gold reefs; in return Rhodes probably helped
President Kruger raise a loan in London to refloat the Transvaal's partially
completed, virtually bankrupt projected line eastward to the Portuguese
port of Lorengo Marques. To a great extent railway finance had consolidated
Cape Dutch cooperation with the empire, while the extension of Cape lines
northward spread the colony's subimperial influence through the Boer republics. As the lines integrated regional politics there were as many negotiations for interstate railway agreements as there had been in Canada; there
was also much talk of a South African confederation, which the British Government had long promoted, but as in Canada, it proved extremely difficult
to reconcile the various sectional interests involved. A railway and customs
alliance between the Tranvaal republic and Natal colony soon emerged in
opposition to that of Cape Colony with the Orange Free State.7 The connecting power of railways had integrated one republic and colony against
another colony and republic.
South African trunk lines differed from the Canadian in one vital respect,
which helps to explain their explosive political effects; three of them ran to
the same inland terminus. By 1895 the railways from the Cape and Natal
were competing with the Transvaal's Lorenzo Marques line to carry the
mounting traffic of the Rand to different ports. A geological accident, discovered in 1891, had buried inexhaustible gold reefs under the most antiimperial of the four states and delivered the central asset of the South African
economy into President Kruger's hands. Just as the inflow of mostly British
mining capital refreshed his revenues, the Rothschild Loan from London
had given him his Lorenco Marques railway; it was essential for the development of the mines, but it also freed the republic from dependence on
colonial ports. Subscribing evenhandedly to colonial and republican mines
and railways alike, the British private investor had undermined imperial
paramountcy and reversed the South African balance of wealth and power
in favor of anti-imperialism. His capital might serve the empire incidently,
or it might not; his loyalty could not be relied upon.
lUiodcs at this point lost his faith in the chances of railway sub-imperialism
overcoming Kruger's railway republicanism. In control of the Transvaal seclions of all three lines, the president could now decide what share of Rand
liallie (on which they depended to pay the mortgages on their lines) the
other states should enjoy, but Rhodes took much too gloomy a view of the
pmspccts. He expected Kruger to combine his economic power with appeals
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Railway Imperialism
to Afrikaner sentiment and blackmail the other states into joining a United
States of South Africa. Without waiting to see whether railway imperialism
had failed in the long run, the Cape premier resorted to imperial intervention, and the ultimatum over the Drifts Crisis and the abortive coup in
Johannesburg made certain that railway imperialism would fail in the short
run and justify his darkest forebodings. Before his attempt to annex the
republic into an imperial federation, there had been a good chance that
industrial growth would eventually pull the Transvaal into a South African
union; after his intervention most Afrikaners were neutral or alienated from
collaboration with the empire, and British anxiety over railway republicanism
was justified.
Confederation under the British flag was of little value at the price of turning the subcontinent into another Ireland. Two decades earlier, the effort of
the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, to force
the Transvaal into an imperial union had ended in the First Anglo-Boer War
(1880-1881). After 1895, states competing to decide the future of South Africa
along rival railways found that they terminated in a second, bloodier war
(1899-1902). The underlying strength of railway imperialism was to be real
firmed in the upshot. Once the republics had been reconquered, the need for
a centralized railway and customs system was perhaps the strongest compulsion
driving victors and vanquished alike into imperial union.
A financier of empire-buillding, an empire builder in finance, Cecil Rhodes
could be an imperialist in London, an Afrikaner in Cape Town, between
times occasionally, a student at Oxford, but always he was a speculator in
railway and mining futures. His various roles were played so ambiguously
that it is hard to tell which one had the lead, but certainly, he was a eon
summate exponent of railway imperialism. With this object in view his mind
ran on imperial routes from Cape Town to Kimberley, Delegoa Bay, Beini,
and soon, to Cairo. There was a fourth trunk line projected to link dupe
Colony with a fifth south African state in which the "Colossus" was interested
personally, and which, though separate from the Johannesburg network, WIIN
perhaps closely connected with his dramatic bid for imperial federation In
1895.
The Bechuanaland railway was planned in 1889 as a line free of republican
control to secure the supposedly rich gold deposits of Matabeleland for
Rhodes' syndicate and the empire. If and when they materialized, the linn
would supply a new British colony north of the Transvaal, whieli won hi
surely be planted in the expected gold rush. The Bristish settlers, it wan
hoped, would be incorporated as a loyal counterweight to Afrikaner repnb
lican preponderance in a future South African federation. The Beehnunu llni«
in this sense was an instrument of imperial strategy. After claiming llit«
territory, the British Government handed it over to Rhodes' South Ah Ira
company with the land and mineral rights to be governed at company «'*
pense. In return for financing the line and the new colony, "the great niiial
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183
gamator" extended his private mining empire under the imperial flag from
the De Beers diamond cartel in Kimberley into the heart of central Africa.
In that sense the project was an instance of private railroad imperialism
aimed at preempting a territorial monopoly of minerals for a capitalist syndicate.8 Two years later geologists discovered the true gold Rand, not in the
South Africa company's domains, but in the Transvaal. Rhodes had backed
a white elephant for a heavy, long-term liability. He decided that Kruger
must be toppled in 1895 for good imperial and Cape colonial reasons and
the more urgently, no doubt, because he expected a successful imperial
federation of South Africa to take his increasingly costly central African
commitments off his hands. Once the Jameson Raid had ended in fiasco, he
began extending the Bechuana-Rhodesia line into the Cape-to-Cairo project
to carry his mineral speculations further and further north.
The Cape-to-Cairo idea was no visionary scheme but a grand exercise in
railway imperialism, as Dr. Hanes suggests in his chapter on central African
lines. Once again, the example shows how Rhodes used the appeal of an
imperial strategic route in an effort to associate the private investor and the
imperial flag with his private search for El Dorados. The example also demonstrates the expansive propensity of railroad finance in that Rhodesian lines
had to reach out for profitable traffic over great distances into the mineral
belts of Zambia, Katanga, and beyond. If most of Rhodes' demands for
imperial diplomatic support were spurned, lines such as these nonetheless
injected a peculiarly South African dynamic into the scramble for tropical
Africa. With John North's nitrate lines in Chile,9 several Chinese concessions, and the American lines in Mexico, the Rhodesian lines belong to a
separate class of capitalistic railway imperialism designed to preempt and
monopolize mineralized territories, usually with the aid of imperial intervention.
The original plan of the Rhodesian lines had remarkable effects on the
configuration of south-central African politics far into the twentieth century.
By the 1930s, the British colonists in Southern Rhodesia had become selfgoverning, the South Africa company's railways had been nationalized, and
the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt under British colonial rule depended
on the self-governing colonists' lines for its coal supplies and mineral exports.
After the Second World War white Rhodesians were thus able to blackmail
the British Government in its desperate need of copper for postwar reconstruction. Dr. Hanes shows how, under these conditions, the lines originally
designed to integrate white Rhodesia into South Africa and anchor it to the
empire, left the Imperial Government powerless to refuse the white-dominated central African federation in 1951 and to put down Mr. Smith's Rhodesian rebellion a decade later. More than that, the same railways left Mr.
Kiimula and Mr. Mugabe as independent leaders of African nationalist Zambia and Zimbabwe, economically dependent on South African Railways, and
shackled their aid to black nationalists in the south. Imperial lines had an
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Railway Imperialism
unfortunate habit of turning against their designers sooner or later and predetermining the anti-imperial future.
Remarkable as the imperializing effects of railways on the politics of borrowing countries were, they were but the tip of the iceberg of the economic
partnerships with British industrial economy which the lines proliferated in
expanding their export-import sectors. London had invested some £500 million in Canada and £350 million in South Africa by 1913, a great proportion
of which had gone into steel tracks and enterprises that depended on them;
over thirty times these amounts give an idea of today's sterling equivalents.I0
The Canadian prairies, as a result, were turned into a British bread basket,
while the Australian colonies became a British sheep run, and though gold
and diamonds do not create such widespread dependence and interdependence as wool, wheat, or meat, South Africa also became a British economic
satellite, if of a different kind. Exchanges of South African and Canadian raw
materials for British manufactures increased fivefold from the 1870s to 1914;
whether inside or outside of the empire, the countries most heavily indebted
to London expanded their trade with Britain the most.11 Railway and other
infrastructural investment evidently biased these countries in favor of developing the export-import sector. Drawn into more or less profitable partnerships with London's private financial and commercial empire,12 their
politics were correspondingly biased in favor of cooperating with British
free-trade imperialism. Railways, moreover, attracted a flood of new iin
migrants; at the peak of British investment in Canada, between 1900 and
1914, for example, over a million people emigrated from Britain to the*
Dominion.13 This migratory effect of railway investment also did much to
reinforce imperial loyalty in self-governing colonies.
The lines that the British largely financed and partly owned in Argent inn,
however, represent another type of imperialism. They were operating in UN
alien cultural environment, the constitution was far from democratic, the
immigrants attracted were mostly Italian or Spanish, and the imperial eon
nection was lacking. These were clearly pro to-national, but far from suh
imperial colonizing railways. It is a tribute to their autonomous power t h a t ,
in spite of all, they could turn a foreign country into an economic satellite
as easily as a self-governing colony. British investment in Argentina matched
that in South Africa and fell a little short of that in Canada; the lines converted
the humid pampa into a British bread basket comparable with the (lanadltll
prairies, while other regions of Argentina became a major British snppllei
of meat and wool on a scale to match Australia. Argentina's trade with lit i t t i l n
grew as swiftly as that of the self-governing colonies.14
There was no grand design behind these remarkable effects except perlmp*
myriad responses to the systematic play of international capital and com
modity markets, nor was there any significant imperial intervention. A* I >i
Fleming suggests, Argentina's rulers at the outset gave priority to a nut If mil
network for domestic purposes rather than export lines connecting the |mni|Mt
Conclusion
185
to Atlantic ports. Up to the 1880s, they thought in terms of domestic sectional
interests, of economic savings to be made by replacing oxcarts with locomotives along existing internal trade routes, of conquering frontier areas
from Indians, and of bringing great landlords in rebellious provinces under
central control. In Argentina, as in South Africa and Canada, however,
profitable export railways were soon required, not only to obtain the necessary British capital at a reasonable price, but also to subsidize unpayable
branch lines designed to placate provincial interests and provide political
patronage for the state. A national railway system based on domestic economic development was possible in theory, provided the state was strong
enough to raise taxes to otherwise unacceptable levels. As this was not the
case in Argentina, dependence on foreign finance ensured that by 1910 the
greater part of its national network traversed or concentrated in the pampa
and other export-producing areas, since these were the main sources of
railway profits and government revenue. The overlap of common interests
and benefits between the Argentinian state, the producers, and the British
financiers in railway-building was much narrower than in the self-governing
colonies. Great landlords and local bankers enjoyed most of the benefits,
rather than farmers and laborers; oligarchies, rather than elected politicians,
distributed the patronage.
Nevertheless, the lines integrated federal government control over the
hitherto autonomous provinces for the first time since the end of Spanish
colonial rule, while the British integrated an economic satellite into their
international economy, without spreading British political affiliations beyond
the export-import sector. This type of economic railway imperialism produced enough political collaboration in Argentinian politics to provide free
conditions for British private enterprise, so long as financial dependence
lasted, and as soon as the main lines had been built and began to pay their
way, the British railway companies were nationalized.
The most powerful and least manageable type of railroad imperialism
operated wherever the domestic network of an expanding empire extended
across its frontiers into a neighbor's territory, whether in Manchuria or
Mexico. Lines financed at a distance at the end of shipping lines tended to
integrate a country's economic development into a free-trading, international
economy and leave the ownership of its economic assets in local hands;
whereas those coming overland threatened political domination, if not military invasion and territorial incorporation. What is more, they tended to
annex the host country's undeveloped economic resources directly into the
metropolitan economy.
American railroad companies built Mexico's lines during the prolonged
leign of Forfirio Diaz with Mexican state subsidies. Their design, reflecting
the hegemonic influence of the United States over its southern neighbor,
shows what might have happened to its northern neighbor if Canada had
not had alternative railway finance and imperial connections. Several south-
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Railway Imperialism
Conclusion
187
ern United States railroads, including the South Pacific and the Sante Fe\y the 1870s were pressing
for 17
branches
into Mexico
with unofficial
naces."
They enabled
the Mexican
budget support
to break even for the first time
since independence, with something to spare for a university and more
from Washington. After losing half their territory in Texas and California to
schools. Large landowners, including the church, profited from the rise of
the United States, the Mexican Congress, representing fourteen poor and
land values; below the Creole hacienderos, a class of indigenous "developers"
turbulent provinces, was naturally opposed, but Diaz, fearing destabilizeemerged on the backs of American and state enterprises, while the army
tion, granted the American companies concessions for five lines, amounting
enforced its grip on troublesome Indian regions and recalcitrant provinces
in all to 2,500 miles of track. Disclaiming designs on what remained of
by rail. The American railroads certainly promoted state-building, if not
Mexican territory, the United States Secretary of State, James Gillespie
nation-building. As Professor French shows in his account, Mexico City,
Elaine, laid down the terms governing these and subsequent American railwith its state caciques, jefes politicos, and rural police, brought the quasiway-building agreements in two "Manifest Destiny" directives, which
democratic local communes and provincial assemblies under central control
echoed the principles of British free-trade imperialism:
and swept away their obstructive tolls on national and international trade.
Under the banner of enlightened progress, the dictatorship pacified Mexico
[The United States] had a wealth of active and competent enterprise, and a lartfe
for the first time in its national history under centralized administration.
accumulation of capital. It is but natural, therefore, that a part of this great store of
Such were the national dividends from the American railroad contracts.
national vitality should seek the channels. . . offered by the wonderful and scarcely
It was economic progress at enormous social cost by today's standards,
developed resources of Mexico. . . . It is conceived that the Mexican Government
though
even now no development plans can make everyone equally rich at
fully recognizes the importance of extending the facilities of communication between
the
same
time. As Dr. French stresses, in Chihuahua state as elsewhere,
its own component states, and with the neighbouring countries, as conducive to thr
the railroads revived the great estate; the transfer of common and publicly
strength and prosperity of Mexico... it should also be aware of the unwisdom ol
owned land in great blocks to plantation and colonizing companies associated
embarrassing, or practically neutralizing, its concessions of the establishment of
with railroads threw great numbers of peasants into peonage. In Mexico, as
railways . . . from a narrow and suspicious jealousy of the foreign capital it so greatly
in South Africa, mineral lines created a national labor market and sucked a
needs.
flow of unskilled workers off the land into industrial centers. Incipient urMoreover, Elaine continued, the "permanent prosperity for any lines of
banization gave rise to its familiar vices, and as in Dickens' time in England,
railway communication, whether between the Mexican States themselves,
workers were educated into the tyranny of labor discipline with puritan
or as international arteries of intercourse" was dependent upon the develtracts, temperance, and the clock.
opment of traffic along their routes. Mexico would therefore have to disThe kind of annexing, monopolizing railroad imperialism at work in Mexico
mantle the "local complicated . . . tariff regulations which obtain between the
up to 1911 served to strengthen a centralizing dictatorship and attracted
different Mexican States themselves" and enter a reciprocal trade agreement
political cooperation at the top of Mexican society, but, according to John
with Washington.15 Here as elsewhere railways required internal and ex
Hart, it provoked a great deal more popular anti-Americanism and antiternal free trade and central control over provincial authorities. Mexico had
imperialism. Its effects in the long run proved more disruptive than conlittle freedom of choice in making its railway contracts compared with Ar
structive. The nationalist reaction to the operations of an alien railroad state
gentina or the self-governing colonies.
within a state forced the Cientificos at length to begin nationalizing American
With these necessities in mind, Diaz and Gonzales cooperated with the
lines; but it was too late to save their modernized state from disintegrating
American railroad and mining invasion up to 1911. By that time over 15,(XX)
in a long series of Mexican revolutions.
miles of line were operating in Mexico, owned mostly by United States
In North and South America as in southern Africa, the railway served to
railroad trusts; 78 percent of the mining properties, 72 percent of smelting,
expand societies of European origin and ruthlessly brushed aside and suband 58 percent of the oil, and ranching and plantation enterprises also be
jugated the indigenous peoples. They were agents of the European diaspora,
longed to American conglomerates. Trade between the two countries in
and by opening new areas for settlement, they gave it an unprecedented
creased seven-fold from 1880 to 1910.16 For the time being, these railroad*
range and intensity.18 Many lines were subsidized with great tracts of adhad taken over the centers of Mexico's future industrial and agricultural
jaeent land, which prompted companies to bring in more settlers to create
growth. There were no Afrikaner republics in Mexico to dispute their in
traffic and realize the value. Increased European immigration into borrowing
corporation into the United States economy.
countries tended to follow peaks of railway investment, with the resulting
Diaz and his ring of Cientificos, for their part, "saw a brilliant future lot
increase* of wages and the cheapening of land. All the lines considered so
Mexico through the smoke of American locomotives and smelting f i n
l.ii arc examples of coloni/ing, immigrativc railway imperialism. With ha
188
Railway Imperialism
ditions of European or American progressive attitudes and institutions in
their heads, these growing communities of European origin provided relatively congenial collaborators with the hegemonic expansion of international
economy. Hence, in the Europeanized world, railway imperialism worked
more constructively than in Asia or Africa, and for that very reason, its
working life was briefer. Within three or four decades the nations of Europeans overseas had eliminated the imperial implications of their lines
through nationalization.
In India railway and empire-building were connected in simpler ways, and
formal territorial control gave great imperial weight to arrangements for the
cooperation of subjects.19 India, as the Victorians were fond of saying, was a
conquest, not a colony. Sepoy forces, allied with those of rival nawabs and sultans, had subdued the subcontinent for the British before the railway age began. A centralized but tiny civilian administration overruled some two
hundred million subjects, with an Indian army of a quarter of a million at its
back. The empire was self-financing, paid for out of customs dues and reformed land taxes and monopolies inherited from the Moghul emperors. If the
army was strong enough to manipulate the divisive politics of India's polymorphic religious and ethnic communities, it was not powerful enough to
abolish them, as the Great Mutiny of 1857 warned. To reinforce their precarious grip and economize on military expense, the British resorted to railways;
private investors once again provided the loans, and Indian revenues secured
the fixed interest. On this security the London shareholders were said not to
care whether the rails and locomotives they funded were thrown into the
Hooghly River or put into operation. In fact, they had a large stake in keeping
the Indian budget in surplus; losses on strategic lines here as elsewhere had to
be made up out of profits from commercial lines bringing new regions into export production. In the second half of the century, they steadily developed the
subcontinent into a major satellite of the United Kingdom economy. Supply
ing raw cotton, wheat, jute, and tea in return for British cotton textiles and
manufactures, India became even more valuable to the British Isles than (.'an
ada or Australia; it was, indeed from this point of view, the only major sneees.s
ful development outside the European-settled regions and Japan in tli««
nineteenth century. The achievement was largely due to 30,000 miles of si in
pie railway imperialism. If the lines did little to raise the peasant's living stun
dards, they affiliated Indian landlords and bankers politically as well UN
economically with the Raj. Railway profits from the 1880s onward contributed
substantially to Indian revenue, which in total fell little short of the liritUli
Government's income. The network consolidated formal empire-building In
India and with it the central power base that sustained British informal imp<<
rialism from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf.
Indian railways therefore would seem the unlikeliest plaee to f i n d I l i l l U h
railway investors at odds with imperial strategy. Dr. Sethia never! helemi
Conclusion
189
gives an example, which may well be typical of many princely states through
whose subordinate alliances the British controlled a third of their Indian
territory. The negotiations over the Nizam's state railway in Hyderabad
suggest that, even in the grip of overwhelming power at one of the twin
centers of the British world system, a client state could exploit the British
investors' impartiality to frustrate a link in British India's strategic railway
design. Its chief minister aimed at using the credit of his state for an internal
line that would develop Hyderabad; the viceroy wanted to use the state's
credit for one which would fit into the British all-India network. In defiance,
Salar Jung, with the aid of British stockbrokers and Hyderabad bankers,
gained access to the London capital market and raised a loan for his railway.
The project would break the military gauge of the imperial system, but it
would be cheaper to construct.20 It would exploit the state's coal resources
and add to its revenue; it promised ingeniously to bring British investors,
in their own interest, behind the state's agitation for the restoration of its
former rich province of Berar. And strangely, at the India Office in London,
Salisbury allowed it. His casual acquiescence shows the British Government's
normal reluctance to interfere with the private disposition of British private
capital; the viceroys' reluctance to coerce the erring state suggests their
concern to avoid disturbing harmonious relations with other Indian princely
states.21 It took eight years of insidious diplomacy before the viceroy succeeded in using the state's revenue for the line that he required for imperial
purposes. Hyderabad is another instance of the imperial insouciance of the
British private investor. In the shadow of the Indian army, however, even
if Salar Jung's railway had been founded on gold rather than coal, it could
hardly compare as an anti-imperial project, with Paul Kruger's Lorengo
Marques line.
Whereas territorial control gave the British a monopoly of Indian railways,
in Thailand by the 1880s, they were competing for state railway contracts
with French, German, and Belgian bidders. Financial competition made a
great difference to the working of informal railway imperialism, though London remained the cheapest and most abundant provider of railway capital.
During the first three quarters of the century, the British had enjoyed a
financial and commercial oligopoly over much of the world outside Europe
and the United States. After their naval supremacy had cleared the way for
merchants and investors by imposing free trade on much of Asia and Africa,
their competitive advantage had given rise to a largely British international
eeonomy. Under these conditions, so long as the navy could defend the
global free-trade framework, the British Government was able usually to
leave the expansion of informal empire to private enterprise. The relatively
effortless imperial system came under challenge increasingly toward the end
of the eentnry, as the states of Continental Knrope conscripted their private
eupital to win markets for their industries and promote their rival imperial
190
Railway Imperialism
strategies. Railway concessions, as a result, became not only a principal
instrument but a major incentive of European and later American imperial
competition in south-eastern and eastern Asia.
Railway-building countries could now choose between several European
lenders, which meant that insofar as they were permitted to diversify their
financial dependence, the imperial influence generated became more diffuse
and constrained. Dr. Holm's study of Thai state lines provides a remarkable
experiment with this type of competitive railway imperialism. The Buddhist
monarchy played possible lenders against each other in search of the best
bargain. The Siamese railway anti-imperialists also assumed that, if several
powers had a capital stake in their country, the many would cancel the
chances of any one of them dominating or annexing it. Their policy of reverse
divide and rule did not always work well; in exacerbating European competition, it carried high risks of provoking direct imperial intervention. A
buffer state squeezed between British colonial expansion in Burma and Ma
laya and the French colonial advance up the Mekong River from Saigon was
rarely in a position to be clever. When French gunboats forced Bangkok to
surrender its overlordship of Laos and Cambodia in 1893, the British and
Germans did little to defend Siam.
The Siamese princes needed railways badly for all the usual reasons: lor
military defense of their frontiers, for imposing central control over distant
provinces, and in their case, for linking the potential rice production of the
interior to Bangkok markets. Lines would commercialize subsistence agriculture and enable more peasants to pay more taxes, and in money rather
than in kind. Excessive freight rates for carrying their produce to market,
in effect, would enable the monarchy to levy indirect taxation without risking
rebellion, and ensure that more of the revenue collected went into the royal
treasury instead of the pockets of provincial gatherers. On Thai royal railway*
and on the Rhodesian lines owned by the South Africa company alike, tlir
engine driver unwittingly acted as tax collector.
Siamese domestic railway imperialism, Dr. Holm suggests, aimed at mod
ernizing the wealth and power of the Siamese princes without summoning
up a class of foreign-educated technocrats intent on overthrowing the mon
archy.22 Here the dynasts recalled how the middle-ranking samurai ol thp
western baronies had toppled the Japanese shogunate in 1867 and converted
a quasi-feudal empire into a modern state. The Siamese court, howevei,
was unable to rely on domestic capital formation, as the Japanese had, nnlll
their state was modernized enough to ensure that foreign loans served hi
strengthen the borrowing nation, rather than the lenders' informal emplii<«
It was precisely this kind of revolutionary heroics that the Thai monarchy
planned to avoid. By attempting to restrict development to the inn ease nl
royal power, perhaps the regime got the worst of both railway impeiiallnw
and railway anti-imperialism.
After all the dangled loans and diplomatic threats that their poliev invlleil,
Conclusion
191
all the haggling over railway contracts among rival European advisers, who
befuddled its administration, the royal railway department had acquired by
1907 a mere 500 miles of track. The foreign debt should have sufficed for
building twice that length much sooner. A British company, with the help
of diplomatic pressure, had profited from constructing the Bangkok/Korat
line badly; London insisted on a line to Chiang Mai to connect north-western
Siam with British Burma at Moulmein and in 1909 secured another concession linking Bangkok and southern Thailand with the British sphere in Malaya
at Penang. Meanwhile, the French extracted treaties from the Siamese that
excluded British concessionaires from the eastern regions, where they
might threaten French expansion on the Mekong. The colonial powers, in
effect, had countered the Thai divide and rule policy by dividing the country
into exclusive railway zones at the expense of the Thai royal treasury and
the loss of Siamese territory. The scramble for railway concessions here,
however, was a side show of the central and far more serious scramble in
China.
China provides the classic instance of how railway thinking projected
imperial rivalry to a higher pitch of ferocity over a great range of country.
While the "open door" agreements of mid-century had enabled chiefly British merchants to take over much of the riverine and maritime branches of
China's domestic trade, the Manchu regime up to 1896 had kept the door
bolted against railways. Without them the European export-import sector
would remain a tiny excrescence on an introverted peasant economy. The
expected 400 million customers could not be reached, nor could Peking win
back the central power lost to provincial viceroys and gentry during the
Taiping rebellion. Wise as the conservative mandarins were to shut out the
steam dragons of barbarian imperialism, in 1894 they found themselves
defenseless against them. A modern Empire of the Sun inflicted a humiliating
defeat on the unreformed Son of Heaven. A heavy war indemnity forced
him, for the first time, to resort to European loans on a large scale. Financial
crisis, combined with the loss of Korean territory, which opened the way
lor a Japanese thrust into southern Manchuria, left the survival of the Manchu
Is in pi re in question. The swing of the regional power balance from China
to Japan had undermined Manchu authority, on which the open door hung;
alternative ways of protecting European interests had been set up for loan
a i i e t ion among the European powers.
The ensuing scramble for railroad concessions attests the faith of every
power in their capacity for preempting Chinese territorial futures; it was Russian and Japanese strategic railway thinking, however, that drove the others to
nel upon it. St. Petersburg had long envisaged an extension of the trans-Sibei i . i n railway through Manchuria to connect the metropole with its remote
A m u r province; a branch through southern Manehnria, moreover, would seenre an iee-free naval base on the Paeifie. As Professor (ilatfelter suggests, Japan's territorial gains in Korea threatened to eaneel this Hnssian option and
192
Railway Imperialism
open Manchuria to a Japanese imperial railway invasion. Russia therefore took
the lead in evicting the Japanese from the Liaotung peninsula and protecting
Chinese integrity; in return for a defensive alliance and a Russian loan financed from Paris, Count Witte won his Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian railway concessions. His French ally soon obtained the exclusive rail and
mineral concessions of Yunnan for a line that would integrate this province
with her colonial base in Indochina. French railway thinking aimed at establishing an economic monopoly in south-western China, which would preempt
an extension of British free-trading supremacy into the region and open the
way for French protectionism to penetrate British strongholds in the Yangtze
basin through the back door. Looking for markets and a Pacific naval base, the
Germans acquired exclusive rail rights in Shantung, while the isolated British, in an effort to save their main free-trading areas from the monopolizing
railways of other powers, eventually won a sheaf of concessions in the Yangtze
regions. Nevertheless, the leading commercial power in China failed to establish a monopoly of railway concessions here. Peking, with its policy of managing barbarians with barbarians, granted invasive concessions to FrancoBelgian and German syndicates for north-south lines through the British trading areas with the idea of strengthening the Manchu hold on the southern
provinces. If imperial railway thinking was not responsible for the original
Chinese domestic crisis, it was unquestionably both prime cause and instrument of the competition among European and Asiatic empires, which by 1898
had sliced China into spheres of influence along 6,000 miles of projected lines.
In typology the Russian projects in Manchuria, like the Mexican lines, were
designed to annex the future development of a neighbor's territory into a met
ropolitan empire. All the concessions were inspired by competitive, imperial
strategic thinking and, aiming at a monopoly of markets and resources through
territorial control, they were all examples of neo-mercantilist railway imprri
alism. In conception they represented informal railway imperialism at the extreme.
Between the idea and the realization however, the railway ant I
imperialism of the Chinese intervened. As Professor Davis's account stresses,
in spite of all, Peking set out to use railway concessions for regaining control
of the provinces. To a remarkable extent it succeeded in getting the necessary
lines started, only to find that they eroded Manchu authority still further,
In defense of their autonomy the provincial gentry rejected the dynasty'*
contracts with Europeans for Manchu railway imperialism. Their agitation,
combined with popular xenophobia against selling the country to foreign
devils on steam engines, set off the Boxer Rebellion and had much to do
later with the overthrow of the Manchu regime in 1911. The same kind ol
reaction against centralizing lines overtook Diaz at the same time in the very
different circumstances of Mexico. The Boxers halted European rivalry Ini
the time being, while the Powers united in defense ol their legations, anil
the Russians occupied their railway /ones in Manchuria. Peking was lei!
Conclusion
M
19;*
balancing impotently between declaring war on the Europeans with the
southern viceroys or defending the legations to placate the Powers. There
are obvious reasons why railways did little to integrate China. The Manchu
regime was already tottering by the time they were admitted; it was too late
for them to pull it together again. Annexing and monopolizing lines, moreover, attracted few collaborators compared with free-trading lines such as
those in Canada or Argentina. Peking cooperated with Europeans in imperial
railway contracts willy-nilly, but far from generating collaboration, they provoked powerful anti-imperial agitations against both Manchu and European
empire-builders. Consequently, the integrative potential of railways dwindled away in imperial disintegration.
Imperial trains, whether in China or South Africa, could be derailed, even
reversed in an anti-imperial direction at the swing of political turntables.
The subsequent history of Chinese lines runs the entire gamut of reversals,
as Professors Davis and Glatfelter show.
In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, for example, two imperial railroad strategies, one from the west, the other from the east, collided headon along a single track. Thereafter, the Russian-built South Manchurian line
reversed roles and served the Japanese advance into northern China; so also
did the German-built Shantung railway, which the Japanese took over during
the First World War. An even more remarkable reversal would have occurred in 1917 had Khorvat succeeded in using the Chinese Eastern, designed for a tsarist invasion of China, to mount a White Russian invasion of
the now Bolshevik metropole. The line by this time had created a Russian
colonial state within a Chinese province and monopolized its mining and
agricultural development under extraterritorial jurisdiction. By the 1930s
this main line of Russian colonization also had become a branch of Japanese
railway imperialism. It annexed Manchukuo as another colonial puppet state
into Tokyo's Chinese empire. Japan henceforward dominated the railway
politics of China, as war lords divided the provinces while the European
powers, singly or in consort, tried to rescue their defaulted loans, win new
railway contracts, and defend their interests and those of China against Japan.
(Central authority remained widely dispersed until Mao's Red Army reconquered the Chinese empire and nationalized the railways in 1950, much as
the British had done half a century earlier in South Africa.
In conclusion, it seems there were as many kinds of railway imperialism
and anti-imperialism as the number of countries building railways. Under
conditions of free politics and free markets in Canada, subimperial railways
enabled the premier, John A. Macdonald, to construct a proto-national confederation against all the odds of American republicanism and consolidate
its political and economic ties with the empire. In South Africa, however,
Oecil Rhodes's subimperial lines, pursuing similar objectives, ran into Transvaal railway republicanism, backed largely by British capital, and the collision
disrupted the imperial connection. A reconqncst was needed to put railway
194
Railway Imperialism
imperialism back on track to imperial confederation. In contrast, protonational, free-trading railways in Argentina strengthened the state and integrated the import-export sector with the British economy, but without
imperializing domestic politics or sharing the benefits widely throughout the
nation. The American railway extensions into Mexico, on the other hand,
monopolized the development of the export-import sector in American hands
and annexed it to the protectionist United States economy. Diaz and Gonzales succeeded in centralizing the state at the expense of profound provincial
and anti-imperial resentment, which eventually contributed to revolution
and disintegration. British Indian railways, while leaving the ownership of
economic resources largely in Indian hands, opened the subcontinent to the
free play of international markets and developed a British economic satellite.
At the same time, they greatly strengthened the financial and military sinews
of colonial administrative control. The railways in China, as in the Ottoman
Empire, Persia, and Thailand, were designed to preempt territorial futures
and monopolize economic development in Asian empires on the verge of
breaking up in crises of modernization. For these neomercantilist railways,
the Great Powers conscripted private capital into the service of imperial
strategy. Significantly, it was annexing lines extending from European or
Japanese metropolitan networks into neighboring Asian territories that set
off partition into exclusive railway zones. Hence, railway imperialism in Asia
was directly connected with the national security of the metropoles.
Wherever locomotives were introduced, they tended to alter the internal
balance of power and set off a race between the integrating and disintegrating
effects. The outcome in each case depended partly on the type of railway contract with Europe or the United States, but mainly on the country's ability to
adapt its institutional organization to the locomotive's requirements. Adaptation was comparatively successful in countries dominated by elites of European origin, whether elected or not. In these cases, except for a time in
South Africa and a revolution in Mexico, railways integrated local economies
and promoted state building; the state in turn could collaborate with informal
empire and international economy, and sooner or later, the railways served
nation-building. Asian states and empires, except for Japan, took much
longer to adapt; railways, threatening to strengthen central authority, provoked provincial resistance and sooner or later disrupted the state's cooperation with Europeans or Americans. Asian railway anti-imperialism of this
kind made for crises in domestic politics, which imperilled foreign interests,
triggered imperial rivalries, and set off partition of the state's territory. Under these conditions railway zones tended to modulate into colonial occupation. In all these ways the locomotive projected formal and informal empire
to a higher pitch of intensity over a vastly extended range of countries.
It was Europe's age of high imperialism, to a great extent, because it was
the railway age in other continents—this is perhaps the most striking impression left by these chapters. Steam engines admittedly operated to shrink
Conclusion
195
time and distance at the end of shipping lines and cables; they were part of
a general transfer of industrial science and technology, but only the locomotive carried such widespread imperial territorial implications. Even before the tracks were laid, it was the fantastic effects of imagined lines on the
political and strategic thinking of Europeans and non-Europeans alike that
made railways intrinsically imperialistic. It took several decades before they
could be converted for nation-building and justified the universal faith in
high-tech progress, of which the grand central stations in cathedral style are
the monuments.
NOTES
1. Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald. The Old Chieftain (Boston: Hough ton,
MifflinCo., 1956), p. 366.
2. This was the slogan of the British America League inherited by the progressive
Conservatives. See Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald. The Young Politician
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1953), p. 142 passim.
3. W. Kaye Lamb, History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (New York: Macmillan, 1977).
4. The remarks on the Canadian case are based generally on Dr. Roman's work:
"The Contribution of Imperial Guarantees for Colonial Railway Loans to the Consolidation of British North America," (D. Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1978).
5. Macdonald to Noirthcote, 1 May 1878 (Sir J. Pope, Correspondence of Sir
John Macdonald [Toronto, n.d.], pp. 240-41.
6. L. E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The
Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 47. On financial aspects, including railway investment, this
work is of value generally.
7. See K. E. Wilburn, "The Climax of Railway Competition in South Africa,
1887-99" (D. Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1983); A. J. Purkis, "The Politics,
Capital and Labour of Railway-Building in the Cape Colony 1870-85" (D. Phil, thesis,
Oxford University, 1978); J. van der Poel, Railway and Customs Policies in South
Africa 1885-1910 (Cape Town: Longman, 1933).
8. For details, see R. E. Robinson, and J. Gallagher with A. Denny, Africa and
the Victorians 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1981).
9. See J. Blakemore's fascinating study of British Nitrates and Chilean Politics
1886-1896: Balmaceda and North (London: Athlone Press, 1974).
10. On the export of British capital see A. R. Hall, ed., The Export of Capital
from Britain 1870-1914 (London: Methuen, 1968); Davis and Huttenback, Mammon
and the Pursuit of Empire, chaps. 2-4.
11. For statistics of British trade see W. Schlote, British Overseas Trade from
1700 to the 1930s (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952).
12. See especially H. Feis, Europe the World's Banker 1870-1914 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1930); and A. K. Cairncross, Home and Foreign Investment
1870-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), chap. 5, table p. 185.
H. Ibid., chap. 8.
14. See D.C.M. Platt, l^tin America and British Trade, 1806-1914 (Ixmclon:
196
Railway Imperialism
Adam and Charles Black, 1972); Business Imperialism 1840-1930: An Inquiry Based
on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); J. F.
Rippy, British Investments in Latin America 1822-1949 (1959; reprint, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1966); J. Scobie, Argentina, a City and a Nation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 276-77; and J. Scobie, Revolution on
the Pampas (Austin: University of Texas, 1964).
15. Blaine to Morgan, For. Rels. 1881, 20 Mexico, Instructions, No. 133, 1 June
1881, and No. 137, 16 June 1881, quoted in J. M. Callahan, American Foreign Policy
in Mexican Relations (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 495-98.
16. Ibid., p. 519, chap. 13.
17. Ibid., p. 499.
18. See Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth. A Study of Great
Britain and the Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954);
and Brinley Thomas, Migration and Urban Development: A Reappraisal of British
and American Long Cycles (London: Methuen, 1972).
19. See Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire, British Railways and Steam Enterprise in India, 1825-49 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950);
W. J. MacPherson, "Investment in Indian Railways," Economic History Review, 2d
sen, 8 (1955): 177-86; V. Shanmugasundaram, "Some Aspects of the Indian Government's Policy of State Railways, 1869-1884" (D. Phil, thesis, Oxford University,
1975).
20. The Indian princes hitherto had pressed for the broad gauge for their state
railways, while the viceroys had pressed them to adopt narrow gauge because it was
cheaper; the two positions curiously, were reversed later in the instance of Hyderabad. On the gauge problem generally in India, see Shanmugasundaram, "Some
Aspects of the Indian Government's Policy," pp. 268-99.
21. See Feis, Europe the World's Banker, chap. 4.
22. On the question of priorities of railway over canal and irrigation investment,
British Indian officials in the 1870s found good economic reasons for choosing railways. Canals did not attract the British investor, irrigation developed relatively small
areas, and feeder lines were required to carry their production to market. These
could not be constructed until trunk lines were built and provided profits to pay for
them (see Shanmugasundaram, "Some Aspects of the Indian Government's Policy,"
pp. 206-45).
Selected Bibliography
While the literature on imperialism in general is vast, no work explores
the relationship between imperialism and railways. The majority of
sources found in Railway Imperialism are primary and are identified in
chapter endnotes. While some of the more significant works relating to
specific chapters are included here, readers are also referred to these
notes for the specialized literature pertaining to each of the separate
chapters. The purpose of this bibliography is to introduce readers to the
general field of imperialism rather than make any pretense of comprehensive coverage.
Alavi, H. "Imperialism Old and New." In The Socialist Register, 1964. London:
Merlin Press, 1964.
Alvineri, Shlomo. Marx on Colonialism and Modernization. Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1969.
Andrew, Sir William Patrick. Indian Railways. London: T. C. Newby, 1848.
Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1958.
Haron, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. "Notes on the Theory of Imperialism." Monthly
Review 17 (March 1966): 15-31.
liarratt-Brown, Michael. The Economics of Imperialism. Hammondsworth: Penguin
Education, 1974.
lirll, Horace. Railway Policy in India. London: Ravington, Percival & Co., 1894.
llrlls. Raymond F. The False Dawn—European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975.
Europe Overseas: Phases of Imperialism. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Itmilding. Kenneth K., anclTapan Mukerjee, cds. Economic Imperialism. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan. 1972.