The Colonial Train

This book seeks to provide an overview of the role of the railways in the age of imperialism and is based on the general assumption that rail transport was essential for the development of industry, capitalism and colonialism world-wide. It employs a variety of approaches to lay bare the interconnections between economic development and other aspects of society including the ideology underlying thought and action, while focussing on different parts of the world and different representations of trains, railways and railway building. Part I of the volume offers the economist’s approach to the “rationale” for colonial railways, the geographer’s investigation on how their construction affected colonisation and development in Canada and the cultural historian’s analysis of the military deployment of trains in the Sudan and the intense debate it generated in Britain. Part II consists of four literary case studies addressing the role of trains in the spreading of colonial ideology in French adventure literature for boys, Emilio Salgari’s take on railways in British India, the building of the Turkestano-Siberian Railroad (“Turksib”) and the ambivalent views on Central Asia’s modernisation as they emerge in a popular Soviet novel, and the way Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo textualises the multiple issues related to railway building, placing the Colonial Train at the core of capitalist exploitation in a fictional Latin American country.