THE TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION

By the close of the eighteenth century, the outlines of a world economy were clearly visible. Centered in Western Europe, it included Russia, India, the East Indies, the Middle East, northern and western Africa, and the Americas. Trade had increased greatly and shipping had grown in volume and speed, connecting the markets of the world more closely than ever before. The worldmarket, however, was confined to the coasts and along rivers, and its effects were rarely felt a hundred miles inland. The expansion of economic activity into the interior, and its spread throughout China, Japan, Oceania, and Africa, was a major development of the nineteenth century. It was largely accomplished through a revolution in transportation, particularly the development of the steamship, canals, and railroads.

Since the fifteenth century, the wooden sailing ship had been the main instrument of European economic and politicalexpansion. Sailing ships constantly grew in carrying capacity and speed with improvements in design, and they were built of easily available materials. The age of sailing ships reached its zenith in the middle of the nineteenth century, the era of the great ocean-plying clippers that carried the majority of international trade.

Before 1850, the bulk of internal trade was carried by water. In Western Europe, there had been several attempts to supplement the excellent river network with canals. However, it was the demands of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the need to transport huge quantities of coal, that stimulated large-scale canal building in the years 1760-1850, first in Britain and then in Western Europe and the United States. The introduction of steamboats gave an additional impetus to river navigation and canal construction. The steamship rose in stature in the 1870s, when technical progress reduced the amount of coal the steam engine consumed. Technical innovation, along with the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, enabled the steamship to surpass the sailing ship as the chief instrument of international trade.

Methods of land transport continued to be slow, uncertain, and expensive until the boom in railroad construction at mid century. In 1840 there were 5,500 miles of rail trackthroughout the world; just twenty years later, there were 66,000 miles. Of these, 50 percent were in North America and 47 percent were in Europe. The rail lines built during that period served populated areas where considerable economic activity already existed, yet a global ideology of railroads gradually emerged: the belief that railroads could populate and bring wealth to undeveloped regions.

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