Railways and the Consolidation of an International Division of Labor: Hinterlands Join the Global Economy – 1829–1920

Eduardo Albuquerque

Chapter Chapter 4 in Technological Revolutions and the Periphery, 2023, pp 75-100 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The spread of railways consolidated the existing international division of labor. Triggered in 1829, in England, this innovation spread globally through foreign investments – a new form of expansionary forces. The expansion of railways witnessed the rising economic and technological capabilities of the United States, a new source of technological transfer at that time. Nock (World atlas of railways. London, Mitchell Beazley Artists House https://archive.org/details/worldatlasofrail0000nock_k9v9 , 1978) presents data on arrivals and intensities of diffusion of railways. Their spread through India, China, Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America repeated the unequal pattern of the textile industrialization. However, at least in three regions – India, China, and Sub-Saharan Africa – the second technological revolution arrived earlier than the first. This different arrival order of technological revolutions is an indication of possible combination and overlapping of different technologies at the periphery. This Chapter highlights the role of political institutions, as that spread is related both to colonial projects in India and in Sub-Saharan Africa and to active governmental policies in Czarist Russia. These political conditions led also to different capacities of regions and countries to internalize potential backward and forward linkages enabled by railway construction.

Keywords: Railways; Formation of national markets; Periphery; Railways and industrialization; Backward and forward linkages; Dissipation effects; Hinterlands and international division of labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-43436-5_4

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