Download Introduction: Railway Imperialism

Introduction: Railway
Imperialism
Ronald E. Robinson
Industrialized Europe cast its imperial influence over much of a still agrarian
world in the half century before 1914 by building railways in other people's
countries. Their grand central stations in Gothic or Romanesque cathedral
style are the monuments. The locomotive had already proved its remarkable
capacity for joining local and national economies in growth in Europe and
the United States, and once the trunk lines had been completed at home
with profits, railway mania spread abroad. Investing heavily in foreign and
colonial lines, private capitalists, especially the British, integrated country
after country into the international economy as primary producers. By 1907
trains were running along some 168,000 miles of tracks outside Europe and
the United States and the construction capital investment was almost £1.5
billion. 1 Meanwhile, the capacity of railroads for absorbing small states into
empires fascinated Europe's geo-strategists. Bismarck had shown what they
con Id do in hauling German principalities into the Prussian empire; their
ability to combine military forces at a single point had been proved by his
generals in beating the French at Sedan. Projecting rival imperial strategies
along steel rails long before they were laid, the Powers soon used railway
loans and concessions to stake out spheres of influence in other continents
and cajole their rulers into subordinate alliance.2
Various theories associating the politics of extending empire with the
pi ivate economics of expanding capitalism are debated in an effort to explain
the imperial dynamics of the age but, in reality, these two movements were
combined and projected largely in a third dimension, which has often been
t u k e i i lor granted in imperial accounts. 3 A revolution in international trans-
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port was required to carry them to their destinations on such a scale. The
locomotive, along with the steamship and telegraph, shrank time and space
within and between regions and seemed to bring almost everywhere within
striking distance of Europe and lend to it new economic and strategic significance. The railroads and canals that engineers and navvies constructed
were celebrated as feats of universal progress.
Railway-building from a Eurocentric viewpoint served as an instrument
of informal empire-building; in that sense it was a function of European
expansion. The experimental notion of "railway imperialism" suggests that
the railroad was not only the servant but also the principal generator of
informal empire; in this sense imperialism was a function of the railroad.
Between the operations of private capital and imperial strategy, the transfer
of high transport technology had a certain freewheeling momentum of its
own. Lord Salisbury, the cleverest of British expansionists, defined the
essence of the idea in 1871 when he predicted: "small kingdoms are marked
out by the destinies of the world for destruction. . . . The great organizations
and greater means of locomotion of the present day mark out the future to
be one of great empires."4
The imperial propensities of locomotion were demonstrated on a vast scale
in the era of transcontinental lines and continental partitions that followed.
By rail, for example, the British Raj rivetted military control on the Indian
subcontinent and defended its northern frontiers against Russian lines approaching from the Caspian Sea and Tashkent, a conflict which led the two
Powers to divide much of central Asia and Persia into exclusive railway zones
by 1907.5 Lines extending from Berlin, Vienna, and Constantinople into the
Balkans did much to bring about partition there, while the projection of the
trans-Siberian line to the Pacific, together with that of the Berlin-Constantinople line to Baghdad, drove the Powers to partition the Chinese and
Ottoman empires with exclusive railroad rights.6 In these instances European
governments conscripted private railway capital into the service of imperial
strategy. The "great game" in Asia was being played in earnest along lines
which, as they extended from their domestic networks, directly connected
imperialism in Asia with national defense in Europe.
In a very different context the dividers of tropical Africa also had transcontinental routes in mind, though they were mostly taking options on
remote possibilities. A great deal of the scramble here ran on connecting
the great lakes and rivers overland by rail, and on prospectuses that promised
or threatened to link the center of Africa to ports and monopolize the imaginary trade of unknown hinterlands, whether from Cape to Cairo, from
Algeria or Tunis across the Sahara to Kano or Lake Chad, or by joining the
upper Senegal and Niger rivers with Dakar and Timbuktu.7 These constructs,
for the most part, were too risky for the private investor, of too little strategic
importance to attract more than dribs and drabs of imperial subsidy; the
only serious strategic railway projector in tropical Africa was perhaps lord
Introduction
3
Salisbury, who, from Whitehall at taxpayers' expense, directed the building
of the Uganda line with the idea of frustrating a chimerical French threat
to British control over the Suez route to the East.8
If the scramble for Africa was largely a product of lines envisioned on
maps, the impact of the railway on sub-imperial rivalry in South Africa was
real enough. Colonies and republics competing on rival lines for control of
the subcontinent's future found that they all terminated in the Second AngloBoer War.9 Thereafter, the need to keep lines solvent and create a national
system played a great part in drawing the South African colonies into the
Union in 1909, as it had done in confederating British North America half
a century earlier.10
These examples of various connections between railroad and empirebuilding suggest that Salisbury was right in thinking of the locomotive as
the main engine of imperialism. It was certainly a major cause of imperial
rivalry; the mere rumor of a project in a sensitive area could bring its
territorial future up for auction at international conference tables. The railroad as such had enormous territorial implications; it normally required the
backing of the host government, and a territorial concession with financial
guarantees was usually needed to exclude competing lines, ensure profit,
and attract the necessary long-term investment. In Asia and Africa, moreover, imperial intervention was often called for to stabilize political conditions for successful railway operations. Steel rails had a capacity for
transforming the societies through which they ran and for spreading imperial
influence in their domestic affairs, which often provoked anti-imperial reactions and involved European interests in local crises. The locomotive
clearly had a unique propensity for integrating and annexing territory, for
monopolizing its resources, and for preempting the future of great stretches
of country. All these implications, it is suggested, gave rise to a distinctive
type of railway imperialism, which added a new dimension to European
expansion and projected it to a higher pitch of intensity over a vastly extended
rtnge.
locomotives generated informal imperial influence in preindustrial societies, whether or not lines were supported by the political intervention of
an imperial power. In the European-settled parts of the world, there were
very few local communities who were not desperate for a line to bring life
and prosperity to their towns, while every government wanted railways for
its national development. Progressive elites in Asia and Africa also were well
aware that a country without trains was unarmed and likely to remain poor
and incapable of modern administration; just as without a telegraph, it was
i leaf. But importing the technology was expensive and too risky for local
mpitalists to undertake; lines rarely paid until an entire system was completed, and even then dividends were often far to seek; payable traffic waited
on the economic growth a line generated, which took far longer to mature
llian it took to open the railway. As London, joined later by Paris and Berlin,
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remained the only source of long-term risk capital, prolonged overdrafts on
the world's bankers were required.11 The British Imperial Government
rarely took a financial share in railway enterprises in foreign countries or
self-governing colonies; they were typically joint ventures between European private lenders and states on other continents who guaranteed a fixed
interest on the security of their own revenues. These governments, struggling to balance their budgets while financing new lines and subsidizing
others to keep them in operation, fell into financial dependence loan by
loan. Their lands and taxes were mortgaged to the hilt for railways that were
also in pawn.
The dependence of railroad-building countries on European stock exchanges imposed certain constraints on their internal affairs. The private
investor in London was unlikely to subscribe to the next flotation if the
borrower's domestic or tariff policies damaged the lender's free trading interests or offended his national sentiments. With an eye to return of capital,
investors naturally favored lines connecting promising pastoral and agricultural areas to ports and bringing them into export production. The expansion
of export-import interests in turn influenced the domestic politics of the
borrowing country in favor of affiliation with its chief imperial financier and
trading partner. In the quasi-colonial societies of European origin, railway
loans often made the difference between boom and slump. They opened
new lands for settlement, attracted more immigrants from Europe, and
accelerated colonization. They were used as agents of nation-building as well
as empire-building. They set local capital and labor at work by providing
the infrastructure of public utilities, and the benefits spread widely throughout the internal political economy. Railway contracts may have been unequal
but they were not that unequal; they offered patronage to politicians, markets
for farmers, profits for land speculators, fees for lawyers, employment for
town workers, and convenient travel for the general public. And for this
reason the politics of these countries to a greater or lesser extent became
"railway politics." The politicians who promised to bring lines through most
constituencies tended to win most popular support, though they lost it again
when the flow of railway capital dried up.
All these joint interests of lenders and borrowers in financing railroads
exerted two powerful influences on the internal political economy. In the
first place, locomotives tended to pull their economic growth into complementarity with European industry and their politics in favor of free trade;
in the second, they spread political affiliations with the lending country
through large sections of the quasi-colonial economy. The railroad, up to
1914, was thus a main generator of those insidious partnerships of imperial,
financial, and commercial interests that go into the making of "informal"
empires.
Whose empires they were, however, is open to question. The host government had to agree with investors, and in some instances, the imperial
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5
government, before lines could be constructed, and each depended to some
extent on the good will of the others. Host states wanted lines that would
promote national development and, as they were often free to take or leave
loans, they usually had the last word in deciding which lines should be built
and under what conditions they should operate. The investors, for their part,
wanted lines that would secure a safe return on capital, often regardless of
the imperial consequences, while the Powers, if they were involved, promoted lines that would serve imperial strategy. Among these divergent
national, financial, and imperial considerations, railway contracts were struck
on the overlap of mutual advantages. They were thus characteristic of the
collaborative bargains of informal imperialism, but the extent to which they
spread political ties with extending empire or unequal economic partnerships
with expanding international economy depended on who decided where
lines should run, what priorities should be served, and whether the capital
lent had imperial strings attached. A good way of uncovering the working
of informal empire through local collaborators in the age of imperialism is
therefore to study the original history of railway-building. By the same token,
the nature of railway imperialism in the countries more or less imperialized
can be seen in the design of their early trunk lines.
This volume accordingly may be regarded as a set of experiments with
the idea of railway imperialism. Contributors account for the origins of main
lines in several independent and self-governing countries, and their essays
are of great interest as such. At the same time, they reflect on the imperial
and anti-imperial effects of railways whose rails traced the divergent paths
of expanding capitalism, imperial strategy, and modernizing nationalism.
The reader is thereby offered an opportunity of seeing the slippery notion
of informal empire in operation and of testing its validity.12 The railway has
often been studied from the standpoint of imperialism; this book makes a
beginning with studying imperialism from the standpoint of the railway.
NOTES
1. Fifty-six thousand miles were in Asia (including 30,000 in British India, approximately 5,500 in Siberia and Manchuria, 5,000 in Japan, 4,000 in China, and
^.H(K) in Russian central Asia); 18,500 in Africa (including 3,400 in Egypt, 3,000 in
Algeria and Tunis and 7,000 in British South Africa); 20,000 in Australasia; 22,500
In (.'anacla; and 49,000 in Latin America, chiefly in Argentina (13,600), Mexico (13,600)
.UK! Hra/il (10,700). There were 237,000 miles of line in the United States and 200,000
in Miirope (23,000 of these in the United Kingdom), Encyclopaedia Britannica, llth
IM|.. s.v. "Railways."
2. The "Powers" commonly refers to the world's great political and military
Imwers. During the period covered by this volume, those involved in railway imIM iiiilism included France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, and the United
Stairs.
.1 Wolfgang J. Mommsen gives an excellent summary in his Theories of Impe-
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rialism (New York: Random House, 1980); M. Barratt-Brown, The Economics of
Imperialism (Harmondsworth: Peguin Education, 1974); Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972); Bernard
Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970).
4. Hansard (H. L.), 3d ser., vol. 204 (6 March 1871), cols. 1366-67.
5. V. Shanmugasundaram, "Some Aspects of the Indian Government's Policy of
State Railways, 1869-1884" (D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1975).
6. M. K. Chapman, Great Britain and the Bagdad Railway, 1888-1914 (Northampton, Mass: Smith College, 1948); W. L. Langer, European Alliances and Alignments (New York: Knopf, 1950), chap. 10; The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York:
Knopf, 1935).
7. R. Anstey, Great Britain and the Congo in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Oxford University Press, 1962), chap. 11; A. S. Kanya Forstner, The French Conquest
of the Western Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chap. 1;
T. W. Roberts, "Railway Imperialism and the French Advance Toward Lake Chad,
1873-95" (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1973).
8. R. Robinson, J. Gallagher and A. Denny, Africa and the Victorians 2d ed.
(London: Macmillan, 1981), chap. 12, "The Way to Fashoda."
9. K. E. Wilburn, "The Climax of Railway Competition in South Africa, 188799" (D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1983); D. M. Schreuder, The Scramble for
Southern Africa, 1877-95 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
10. D. Roman, "The Contribution of Imperial Guarantees for Colonial Railway
Loans to the Consolidation of British North America, 1847-1865" (D.Phil, thesis,
Oxford University, 1978).
11. H. Feis, Europe, the World's Banker, 1870-1914 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1930).
12. For the debate on informal imperialism, see W. R. Louis, Imperialism, the
Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York and London: New Viewpoints,
1976); P. J. Cain, Economic Foundations of British Overseas Expansion, The Economic History Society (London: Macmillan, 1980).
Railway Imperialism in Canada,
1847-1865
Donald W. Roman
Between 1847 and 1865 on eleven different occasions, imperial authorities
in London and responsible colonial ministries in North America negotiated
terms for an imperial guarantee of a loan for an intercolonial railway.1 They
expected that such a railway would join the port of Halifax with Quebec and
so would link the maritime colonies with Canada; likewise, they hoped that
an imperial guarantee would enable the indebted colonies to raise the necessary capital for this unifying railway at advantageous rates, as the British
Treasury would pay the interest in case the colonies defaulted. Both sides
in the negotiations admitted privately that an intercolonial railway would he
neither viable financially nor defensible militarily against the United States;
yet politically the railway was so significant in the minds of politicians on
both sides of the Atlantic that neither the Colonial Office nor the British
American ministries were willing to terminate their discussions until they
had achieved their objectives. For each the prospect of the imperial #11111
antee for this railway was as valuable in the broad context of their relationships as a whole, in bargaining for related goals, as was the accepted
guarantee and the building of the railway itself.
There was much common ground between the imperial authorities and
colonial politicians on the principle of the intercolonial railway. They eould
agree that without a guarantee from the British Treasury, the railway eould
not be built as it would not generate enough traffic to be profitable; that it
would considerably advance their common interests in the British N o r t h
American confederation, imperial military strategy, colonial sell-defense,
and westward expansion to the Pacific; and that at times the railway was