The Transformation of the World

A Global History of the Nineteenth Century

Jürgen Osterhammel
Translated by Patrick Camiller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford
CHAPTERXIV

Networks
Extension, Dcnsity, Hales

"Network" is a metaphor, at once vivid and deceptive. Networks prodll

dimensional connections: rhey are flat, and they structure level spacéS.~
work has no relief. Network analysis in the social sciences, useful as iti ,''
risks overlooking or underestimating hierarchies, the third, vertical ·di
This is associated with the fact that networks are in a way democratic;:; ·.
nades initially have the same value. Even so, a historian cannot do mu:
them unless the possibility is allowed that a network has strong centers·á
peripheries, that the nades therefore vary in "rhickness." Not every he
to be constructed like a spider's web, with a single center holding eV~
in place. The basic form of urban networks or trading networks is jus·r,··
polycentric as monocentric. The network metaphor is useful mainly b~9·
permits the idea of multiple points of contact and intersection-and heii'
because ir draws attention to what is not networked. Each network· ¡f .·e
structural holes, and the current fascination with unfamiliar, previou'sl
ticed connections and relations, especially over long distances, should nd.
us forget the somber surfaces on the rnap indicating uninhabited nature.Ói
populated countryside. .·-·
A network consists of relations that have attained a certain degree · --
ularity or permanence. Networks are traceable configurations of a .re-· ·
relation or interaction. Hence they are structures with "rnedium" consi
neither one-off chance relations nor organizationally entrenched institu.(_.
alrhough the latter may grow out of networklike relarions. One of the oti
ing features of the nineteenth century was the rnultiplication and accel
of such repeated interactions, especially across national boundaries an
between regions and continents. Here we need to be more precise aboll
rhe six decades between midcentury and the First World War were a p.
unprecedented network building. This is ali the more striking because
rhe networks were dismant!ed during the Firsr World War, and partk
forces grew stronger in the decades following it. If the formation of wo'[l
networks can be described as "globalization" (a broad definirion of this co

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 ·.··'

The steamship, which in long~distance traffic prevailed over che sailingvessel

in the crucial decade of rhe 186os, did not rely on an ext;ernal energy
 Networks 713

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.

The Railroad as Network Technology

The globalization effect of the railroad was notas great as that of the slighrly
older steamship. Railroads are sysrems with narrower spatial limits. 21 Technolog-
ically theywere a complete novelty forwhich che world was unprepared, whereas
the steamship had merged overa period of decades with an older infrastructure
ofwater transportation. When the coal-based teclmologies arrived, there were al-
ready seaports but not yer railroad stations and iron tracks. Once built, however,
the railroad was less dependent on climate and che environment; and this greater
reliability meant that ir could be better tied into production schedules. Only
trains could guarantee the regular food supply to large cities and hence their
future growth. The railroad was also less risky for the carriage of freight: a ship-
wreck might spell enormous financial losses, whereas a rail accident seldom de-
stroyed wealth on a major scale, and insurance costs were accordingly lower. The
techno-economic complex of the railroad gave rise to the first privare companies
of giant size that had ever existed: big business was a creature of the railroad. 22
716 CHAPTER XIV

Even so, governments often had a great stake in railroad construction-nd··-

Britain, but certainly in Belgium and several German states, and in Chiil.;f'
Japan. There were also mixed forms, as in the Netherlands, where it becarne -
after severa! decades of experimentation that private initiative alone would
bring about an integrated network. Only special legislation in 1875 establÍ
a state railroad system, the organization of which-as well as its opera~i
regulations-was brought over almost entirely from Germany. 23
Ir is debatable what should be understood by a route network. Especiall
the non-European world, there were various branch lines unconnected to:'
thing else: for example, the Yunnan line built by the French between rhe N~
ern Vietnamese port of Haiphong and the terminus in the Chinese provi
capital Kunming. In Africa such branch terminal lines were the rule rathe;t
the exception. Only in the south of the continent was there a two-dimensiÓ.
network, which by tl¡.e time it was completed in 1937 ran from the Cape u~
the copper be!t ofNorthern Rhodesia (Zambia)-" The Trans-Siberian Railro
despite a number of feeder lines, was and is a solitary arrow through the 1¿
scape. East of Omsk it served only strategic purposes, did not carry mig
on a large scale, and opened up no economic hinterland. There was a net
in European Russia, but not in Siberia. In China, where railroad constr~~··:
was continuous afi:er 1897, a number of desirable and feasible stretches nevei-
the drawing board for decades, so that the countty had to make do with a
mentary network with many loose ends, especially in the mountainous cou ·
south of the Yangtze. 25 Sorne parts of the interior were added only in theJ
twentieth century, Tibet only in i.006. In the case ofSyria and Lebanon, wh
rhe railroads run by French companies hada different gauge from the OttoriÍ:
ones, two systems operated alongside each otherwith no points of contact.26 .N:"
everything that looks at first like a network holds upas one on closer inspecti~··
In first-generation countries, which could not yet simply importa readyma."
package-and even afterward most technologies retained a special natlO~
aspect 27-the necessary experience had to be assembled from scratch. 28 The c:Q
strucrion and running of a railroad required a large amount of know-how
iron and steel technology, machinery, geology, mining, telecommunications~~
organization, finance, personnel relarions, timetable coordination, and the_:
sign ofbridges, tunnels, and stations. Much had to be improvised before alLt
was put on a "scientific" basis. While technical problems awaited a solutiorr•. l
matters such as land acquisition and related compensation also had to be'.:a·
dressed. Moreover, the railroad was often a political issue with a deeper milit&
significance. In the United States, however, and to sorne extent in Britain;s· -
tegic considerations played a much smaller role than in continental Europe/;
that the state-except during the interval of the Civil War-could safely fo
direct involvement.
The railroad network as we know it today (in sorne cases already redu ,.
when compared with 1913 or 1930) was essentially complete by 1880 in Bdt~·
 Networks 717

'>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 _:":·

A similar symbol of resistance to European control and influence, m~ti~'.­

by geostrategic interests in the face of direct French and British penetratio :
the Hijaz railroad from Damascus via Amman to Medina, with a branch . }'
Haifa. In the decade anda halfbefore rhe First World War, rhe Ottoman E
made the final bid for mobilizing its own resources in a great effort. w_h·
other Ottoman railroads, including the famous one to Baghdad, had bee~~
lished by Europeans, rhe Hijaz route was supposed to be funded, built, and
aged by the Ottomans themselves. The plan was less successful in this re.
than the Beijing-Kalgan railroad, since foreigners working under a Germari·
made up a much larger proportion of the construction engineers. 34 But thé i;-·
message was clear: a ,non-European state could best demonstrate its prÓ
by creating its own technostructures in line with European standards. Tui~
course, was the Japanese formula-much admired but not so easy to copy.:. :,>
Unlike shipping and air transportation, the railroad was ultimately a véh:.'
of national integration. Back in 18z8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ar alm
eighty still akeen observer ofhis time, had assuredJohann Peter Eckerman~t'
he "was not uneasy about the unity of Germany;' since "our good high roads;
future railroads will of themselves do their part." 35 In particular, they integr
national markets or even created them where none had existed befare. This
most visible in regional price differentials: today a loaf of bread costs moi:éf
less the same across a national economy. In 1870 wheat prices varied by as in~.
as 69 percent between New York City and lowa, but by 1910 this had falleJl
19 percent. 36
The internationalism of the railroad leaps to the eye in Europe, where:
confluence of national networks into a single (ahnost) continent-wide netw
was a majar achievement. 37 It brought pan-European norms, such as a de'..
of timetable discipline and punctuality, and standardized many travel exp
ences. But since railroads could not cross rhe seas-even Napoleon's visiq:ri.
a Channel tunnel was realized only in 1994-their globalizing effect was rat
limited. The Trans-Siberian too, with its low passenger volumes, was no ·ID
than a modern Silk Route: a thin strip linking regions across huge distan~e:
without joining them together into a quantitatively significant network. -
Asian railroad sysrems remained unconnected with one another (the sale excé'
rion being the Siberia-Manchuria-Korea route). The Indian system, block .•
to the north by the Himalayas, was never extended as far as Afghanistan, so
Russia would not have a gateway for an invasion of the Subcontinent; to
day, Afghanistan remains a country virtually without railroad facilities. Ins()_
as the railroads were instruments of"railroad imperialism;' there was no nee.
outside India-to build them up into European-style national systems ene
passing places oflesser strategic and economic importance. 38
 Networks 719

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

Cabling rhe World

The total length of submarine cables grew from 4,400 kilometers in 1865
to 406,300 kilometers in 1903. 42 Cable laying in the last four decades of the
nineteenth century created a planetary network, ushering in a telegraph age
tha1 would last severa! decades until long-distance telephony became rea-
sonably affordable. 43 Por the first time in history, privare correspondence
involved a mixture of different media: handwritten or (from che 187os on-
ward) typed letters, interspersed with terse telegrams. Only in the last quarter
of the twentieth century did the fax, e-mail, and mobile phone sea! the fate
of telegraphy.
The cabling of the world was an extraordinary feat, since it meant laying thou-
sands of miles of thick, specially coated cable under che ocean waves, while the
logistics on land was ofi:en not much more straightforward. Ir did not, unlike
canal or railroad construction, require a huge deployment of manpower, and
the technology was less invasive in urban environments. By che mid-eighties, che
globe was, quite literally, wired up. In addition to the transoceanic cables, there
were che much more numerous links over shorter distances: every medium-sized
cicy, at least in Europe and North America, had its telegraph office, and the
lonely operator in a godforsaken station in the Midwest became a stock-in-trade
oflarer Hollywood movies. Rail track and telecommunication cables were ofi:en
laid together, pardy because a train was more or less essential to repair broken
wires in remoce areas. In Australia the first telegraph actually carne into opera-
tion a few months before the first railroad line.44
720 CHAPTER XIV

The basic principle of telecommunication is rhat dematerialized infor

travels faster than people or objects. 45 This goal may be achieved in variouS'
In the nineteenth century, the great new medium with a globalizing effect W:
telegraph, not rhe telephone. The history of the latter began rhree or four de
latet with rhe openingof exchanges in New York (1877-78) and Paris (13 );
79
to be followed by interurban connections (United States in 1884, France ill'-
At first it didnot mean che creation ofan intercontinental network. Thetelep
as it developed in che late seventies, still had a very short range and was limi -,
intra-urban communication-and a city like Shanghai, where it was intro
in the 1881, sported only a handful of devices. Its early history is overwhe
American.46 In rhe 188os and 189os its potential increased not only wirhi
also between cities; then technological progress speeded up after 1900, and
again after 1915. However, links between North America and rhe rest of the_w.-
were not possible until,the 192os, became reliable only in the 195os, and coúf
afforded by ordinary individuals only from rhelate l96os on. The original te
ogy was developed almost emirely at Bell Laboratoties, and subsequently A'TI
enjoyed a kind of monopoly insofar as that was possible under anritrust legisla'
Bel! and AT&T held rhe key patents and marketed thern intetnationally.
The nacional telephone networks that sprang up in the early twenrierh,,t
tury were nearly all state monopolies, and sometimes, as in Latin Amef('
countries, governments gave preference to state-run telegraphy. 47 Where it -e~
into use early on, the telephone was a too! for people who had also rapidly:
opted the telegraph. The first user groups were New York stock dealers, ·
soon learned to handle the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell.48 Batch p'
ducrion ofThomas Alva Edison's later model began only in 1895. By 1900
in 60 people in the United States owned a telephone; the figures for Swe.
France, and Russia were one in 115, one in 1216, and one in 7000, respecti
Such an important institution as the Bank of England had jusr connecte
far rhe first time. 49 In 1900 the United States was on the way ro becominga,t~
phone society, as the use of telegrams far privare messages was on rhe decline';
Europe the new device made its mark only after rhe First World War.
lt took an unusually long time for the technology to result in a fully op
tional network. Nacional systems were generally in existence by the late 192;
but for political rather than technical reasons severa! more decades passed be_fi
ir was possible to have a reasonably comforrable international conversatioii~ __:
fact rhat a public relephone cornpany was established (in r88l in India, l89zi.
Ethiopia, and 1908 in Turkey) says little about the actual significante ofrhel)l
dium in a country's life.50 Ir turned out to be unsuited for many of rhe purpq'.
for which it was developed. In 1914, for example, the wired field telephony
the German army could not keep up with advances on rhe Western front, w_
the few radio telephones were not up to che task. Technology was therefore ,
able to provide rhe rapid and precise coordination of troop movements tha(,
Schlieffen Plan tequited for the decisive breakthrough.51
111·
1:-_
tit~ Networks 721
~-"­
;;;;>;
''f
~; A)though the telegraph probably changed prívate lives less radically than the
K~:-:-~kphone and Internet did in later periods, its importance for _cornmercial, mil-
tiliraTY• and politic.al activi~y canno: be underestimated. As far back as the Ci~
Í(•\X"at, Abraham Lmcoln dlfected his troops by means of what have been called h1s
~.~f-mails." 52 Indeed, a cabled world had become imaginable already by 1800, long
~fü-:before che rechnology far its realization. Optical signals communication, such as
I!:';:1vfuhammad Ali Pasha introduced between Alexandria and Cairo in 1823, or the
~,',_:~ussian government between Saint Petersburg and Warsaw in the 183os, was a
f:':Jirst practical step.53 Other innovations, above ali the gradual introduction of rhe
::: steamship and che perfection of mail coach services, were concurrently diminish-
c;ingglobal dispatch times which, on the eve of the telegraphic breakthrough, were
';a!ready considerably shorter than they had been around 1820. 54 The electrical tele-
•graph was tested in 1837, and Morse code was in commercial use by 1844. Under-
Water cables were laid all over the world in the third quarter of the century. Once it
>became possible to wire India (1870), China (1871),Japan (1871), Australia (1871),
. the Caribbean (1872), all large South American cities (by 1875), South and East
Africa (1879 ), and West Africa ( 1886), an unprecedemed density of information
carne on stream-even if it was only in October 1902. that a cable under the Pacific
'.':-~ompleted the global network.55 In the 188os, public business information from all
around the \Vorld-such as stock exchange data and price quotations-could be
obtained in London within just two or three days; private cable messages usually
reached the recipient within one day. In 1798 rhe report ofBonaparte's invasion of
· Egypr rook 62 days to arrive in London, hardly less than it would have taken 300
years earlier. In 1815 news ofNapoleon's defeat at Waterloo reached Whitehall only
.two and a half days after it happened-although Nathan Mayer Rothschild had
learned of it by privare courier within 24 hours. On January 8, 1815, severa! hun-
dred British and American soldiers met their end in the Battle ofNew Orleans be-
cause their commanders were unaware rhat the rwo sides had signed a peace agree-
ment in Ghem on December 2+ And just before the telegraph revolutionized the
picture, letters to London were still taking 14 days from New York, 30 from Cape
Town, 35 from Calcutta, 56 from Shanghai, and 60 from Sydney. Ayear before the
transatlantic cable was laid, people in London learned only 13 days later of Lin-
coln's assassination in Washington, DC, on April 15, 1865. After the opening of the
tdegraph age, news of rhe assassination ofTsar Alexander 11 in Saint Petersburg on
March 13, 1881, carne through in just 12. hours.56
Individual markets now responded more quickly to one another, and price
levels carne into closer convergence. Since orders could be placed at short no-
tice, it was no longer necessary in many business sectors to keep large stocks on
the spot; this worked to the advantage of small firms. Telegraphy also smoothed
the ascent ofbig business: large conglomerares could now operare with strewn-
out locations, and communicative functions previously entrusted to agents
could be brought in-house more easily. Middlemen and brokers became dis-
pensable over time.
722 CHAPTER XIV

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

advantage for a diplomatic stage performance that decisively sapped morale on

rhe French side. 61
In other circumstances, tlie telegraph cóuld also be used for subversive effect.
It enabled the coordination of political movements over large areas, as in India
in 1908 (or the United States ayear earlier), when rhe virtual community of tele-
graph operators organized a countrywide strike that crippled administrative and
business life from Lahore to Madras and from Karachi to Mandalay. Cables were
alsa an object of international (ar even intra-imperial) politics. Canada faught
far rwa decades far a Pacific cable tliat would give it greater freedom and draw it
doser to its Western neighbors, while the government in London kept creating
new obstacles in order to preserve tlie classical arrangement whereby peripheral
regions communicared with one anotlier via the imperial center only.62 Little
rechnology transfer ro newcomers or imitators was involved in the rwenty-year-
long cabling of the world. Ownership of the hardware and control ofknow-how
remained in the hands of a few inventors and investors.
As far the "old" means of communication, tliere was a majar expansion of
letter mail-up from 412 million to 6.8 billion units per annum inside Ger-
many between 1871and1913, and by a proportionally similar amount for foreign
mail.63 Never had international correspondence been as common as ir was in
summer 1914. To be sure, it was still by no means the case tliat mail reached every
inhabitant of the planet; services began to thin out even in peripheral areas of
Europe. A large part of Russia's rural population had no access to mailboxes or
post offices. But the vast expanses of the United States were already thoroughly
covered by the eve of tlie Civil War; communications and literacy drove each
other upward in a continua! spiral. 64
Another new network-creating technology was the electricity supply, which
also appeared on rhe scene in the great watershed decade of the 188os. Simple
prototypes of central electricity stations were in operation from the beginning
of rhe decade, and current transmission over a certain distance between cities
becarne feasible in the early nineties. Networks had to combine the three func-
tions of generation (mainly through waterpower), storage, and transmission of
electricity. On the eve of the First World War, technology had matured ro the
point that systems of regional energy production and distribution were in place
virtually all over the world. Urban households were connected to these systems,
electricity entered the daily life of the affiuent classes, and the electromotor
found ever more practical applications in tra:ffic and manufacturing. 65 Whereas
Britain had pioneered the global telegraph and America the telephone, the
world center of electricity was Germany-or rather, Berlin, "the electrical
metropolis." 66 Majar standardization comparable to tliat of the early railroads
had to wait until after 1914; up to then there was a chaos of different voltages
and frequencies, with few electrical networks transcending the confines of indi-
vidual cities and regions and none crossing nacional borders. Only in tlie 192os
did the technical and political conditions exist far extensive energy linkups,
724 CHAPTER XIV

and in 1924 the need for international regulation was made explicit at the.S'
World Energy Conference.

2 Trade

World Market-Regional Markets-Niches67

For a long time the growth of the modern world econo_my was seen in
West as a spreading oflinks and contacts out from Europe; the memorable im~
of the phased development of an expansive "modern world-system" (ImmanÜ
Wallerstein) also served to encourage this. Today, however, it is more plausib
to suppose that the emerging world economy of the seventeenth and early eig
teenth centuries was polycentric: severa} different commercial capitalisms floU
ished simultaneously iti different parts of the world, each associated \Vith the
ofproduction for distant markets. 68 European trade dominated the Atlantic an
from the middle of the eighteenth century, pushed back the Asían competitío
But it would too simplistic to envisage the world economy, as it was re.structure
after the 184os under the aegis of free trade, as a single network spanning_th-
globe. 69 The world market is a rather abstraer theoretical fiction. Depending
the commodity (which could also be human beings ), many markets grew so larg
that one might describe them as global. But non e of these can be separated fró
its specific geography; none covered the earth in a geometrically even manner;:;:
Regional subsystems retained, or regained, a dynamic of their own. Betwee
1883 and 1928 trade within Asia grew significantly faster than between AsÚ{
and the West; 70 and for the most part the differentiation and distribution o:-_
economic roles within those regional systems was driven internally, not frorrl
Europe or by Europeans. Thus, after 1800-not earlier!-an international ric~:
market developed in Asia: Burma, Siam, and Indochina exported the commo4{-
ity, while Ceylon, Malaya, the Dutch East !ndies, the Philippines, and China·
imported it.71 Demand for rice was less an indicator of poverty than a result"-
of regional specialization and, to sorne extent, higher consumption standa.rds~---:-~
given that it was seen in all Asian societies as a high-grade cereal comparable to_:__,:
wheat in Europe. The spread of modern technology did not necessarily mea1i.-
that "premodern" forms of transportation and exchange disappeared frorn cross~:::
border markets. The junk routes to Southeast Asia from the great port of Cantón'
were by no means a legacy of "traditional" China but resulted directly from thé:
ttading monopoly that the Qianlong Emperor had awarded to the city in 175ii
Junks did not become obsolete throughout the nineteenth century, any more
than Arab dhows did in the Indian Ocean. European ships did not really drive
out other vessels except in the transportation of cotton and opium. Trade links -:_
with Southeast Asia remained under Chinese control.72
From the point of view of commercial history, the nineteenth century was ii1>_:-
rnany respects a continuation of the early modern period. In the seventeenth and;::~-