#Schivelbusch railway journey commodity free

While it is clear that the economic elites of England demanded the development of the steam engine and the subsequent railroads, the losses engendered by this new mode of transportation are much more difficult to discern. Hence, the use of coal in an iron based mechanical environment meant that England was to be the first out of the industrial starting gate and, for a long time to come, dominate the industrial production of the globe. French coal deposits were found scattered throughout the country, hampering its exploitation. France, on the other hand, while possessing coal, did not possess it in sufficiently centralized area (7). The fact is that England’s coal supplies were plentiful, and, more importantly, centralized in a few districts, making exploitation and transportation much easier. The industrial revolution, in a sense, can be said to rest upon the shift from a wood-based economy to one of coal. When wood became scarcer and more expensive, substitutes needed to be found. The shift from wood to coal was brought about by a long process of deforestation that had taken place steadily since the high Middle Ages. In England, the move from a wood based to an iron/coal based economy made this shift a possibility. Movement and progress, rather than the more stationary ideas of virtue and stability dominated: it would have been a miracle if someone had not applied the movement of the industrial capitalist to the world of biology. Industrial capitalism enshrined the doctrine of the survival fo the fittest right around the time Hegel and later Darwin (both Erasmus and Charles) struggled with these concepts as a developmental reality, rather than as a static one. The better inventions of technology edge out others, which then fall into the abyss of memory. Parts are discarded and appear as a result of this constant dialectal pressure. It develops piece by piece, as the development of the whole demands changes among specific parts.

#Schivelbusch railway journey commodity free

It begins with fits and starts, the economic “organism” struggling to free itself from dependency on its environment. The evolution of the machine in modern times fits the Darwinian model perfectly. It fits the development of industry far better than the purported development of natural organisms. The fact is that the author skillfully hints that the development of evolutionary biology has nothing to do with biology. Coach travel was to become a vestigial organ in production and distribution once the railway was developed, as well as the steam engine, based on coal, that preceded it. Overland coach transport was considered inefficient because it depended on the upkeep of animals, namely horses, that were expensive to feed and care for. While nearly every other element in the productive process was quickly moving “forward,” transportation was not. The weakest link in capitalist production in the early19th century was overland travel. So the old slogan “man against nature” really amounts to economic elites against nature. Railroads were demanded by elites, and hence, built by elites. Man should be qualified, for it is a label that hide more than it reveals. Railroads conquered perception, something far more intimate than man’s relationship to matter. The nature of this shift is the thesis of this book.

Hence, the conquest of time and space is a qualitative distinction from science’s conquest of matter, a conquest still taking place. This is what makes the railway unique, it is what gives rail travel a philosophical and epistemological value not lost on such writers as Leo Tolstoy. The conquest of matter is a long standing aim of the natural sciences, but the conquest of time and space is the domination of the inner man, the very nature of perception. It was one thing to want to conquer the world of matter, quite another to conquer the conditions under which matter appears. More specifically, it was a conquest of something more than nature, but the forms under which nature appears, that os time and space. Railroads were a symbol: they were a symbol of the industrial revolution, but, most important of all, it was a symbol of man’s conquest of nature. Efficiency is easy to quantify, the way of life destroyed by such monoliths is not measurable and hence, given modernity’s obsession with measurement, easier to ignore. Established opinion stresses the efficiency and progress that such travel engendered, but the more or less non-quantifiable things that were lost or damaged is something else entirely. The railway revolutionized England, America and all Europe.