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A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize "A powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd observations." —Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review The transcontinental railroads were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating economic panics. Their dependence on public largesse drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, remade the landscape of the West, and opened new ways of life and work. Their discriminatory rates sparked a new antimonopoly politics. The transcontinentals were pivotal actors in the making of modern America, but the triumphal myths of the golden spike, Robber Barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.
Overregulated and displaced by barges, trucks, and jet aviation, railroads fell into decline. Their misfortune was measured in lost market share, abandoned track, bankruptcies, and unemployment. Today, rail transportation is reviving. American Railroads tells a riveting story about how this iconic industry managed to turn itself around.
Most economic theory assumes a pure capitalism of perfect competition. This book is a penetrating critique of the rhetoric and practice of conventional economic theory. It explores how even in the United States—the most capitalist of countries—the market has always been subject to numerous constraints. Perelman examines the way in which these constraints have been defended by such figures as Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, and Herbert Hoover, and were indeed essential to the expansion of U.S. capitalism. In the process, he rediscovers the critical element in conservative thought—the “forgotten traditions of railroad economics”—that has been lost in the neoliberal present. This important and original historical reconstruction points the way to a discipline of economics freed from the mythology of the market.
As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present. China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion. The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.
The first English translation of the most comprehensive and detailed work on the development, construction, finance, and operation of early American railroads and canals.
This book is an outcome of the conference on the development of large technical systems held in Berlin in 1986. It focuses on the comparative analysis of the development of large technical systems, particularly electrical power, railroad, air traffic, telephone, and other forms of telecommunication.
Excerpt from American Railroad Economics: A Text-Book for Investors and Students In no other country and at no previous time have railroad operations received as much attention as at present in the United States, and it is doubtful whether these matters have ever been more fla grantly misinterpreted. The economic importance of American railroads and the participation of the people as individual investors in their rapid growth and development creates a demand for the proper understanding of railroad activities and operating results. Government regulation under the Inter state Commerce Act has promoted and assisted this demand. The publications of the Federal and State commissions are now as important sources of statistical, information as the reports issued by the individual railroad companies. These published sta tistical returns are in many ways useful to the rail road manager, to the investor and to the public. The expensiveness of compilation and the liability to abuse and misinterpretation render necessary the utmost wariness and care in analyzing such data. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Rapid population growth in the Great Plains and the American West after the Civil War was the result not only of railroad expansion but of a collaboration among competing railroads to adopt a uniform width for track. This title shows how the consolidation of smaller railroads and the growth of capitalism worked to unify the railroad industry.