This collection of articles combines a set of works that study the contribution of transport infrastructure to the process of state building in different countries in Western and Central Europe. The focus and the themes treated vary, but have two common denominators: firstly, they are based on either completely original, or previously little-used, primary sources; and secondly, each work reveals new ways of interpreting how transport networks have shaped the territories into which they were introduced. Each article is an example of the wealth of potential approaches available and also helps us to interpret the processes involved in state building, which are a necessary precedent to European Integration (EI). To put the seven works that make up this special issue into context, I shall start this introduction by examining three aspects that complement them. I shall firstly clarify what we mean by EI. Secondly, I shall examine whether EI processes existed prior to the creation of the institutions that were set up after World War II to promote integration. Then, thirdly, and finally, based on the previous analyses, I shall look at the emergence of a railway network in Europe and the role that the European states played in this process. The fourth section will present the articles.

Transport routes are basic elements that are inextricably linked to diverse political, economic, and social factors. Transport networks may be the cause or result of complex historical conjunctions that reflect to some extent a structural conception of the political systems that govern each territory. It is for this reason that analyzing the evolution of the transport routes layout in a wide territory allows us to recognize the role of the political organization and its economic influence in territorial design. In this article, the evolution of the transport network in the Iberian Peninsula has been studied in a broad chronological framework to observe how the different political systems of each period understood and modified the transport systems. Subsequently, a second analysis of the evolution of transport networks in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula is included in this article. This more detailed and geographically restricted study allows us to visualize in a different way the evolution and impact of changes in transport networks. This article focuses on the calculation of the connectivity to analyze the intermodal transport systems. The use of network science analyses to study historical roads has resulted in a great tool to visualize and understand the connectivity of the territories of each studied period and compare the evolution, changes, and continuities of the transport network.

This study explores the relationship between railroad integration and regional development on the European periphery between 1870 and 1910, based on a regional data set including 291 spatial units. Railroad integration is proxied by railroad density, while per capita GDP is used as an indicator of economic development. The period under study is of particular relevance as it has been associated with the second wave of railroad construction in Europe and also coincides with the industrialization of most of the continent. Overall, we found that railroads had a significant and positive impact on the growth of per capita GDP across Europe. The magnitude of this relationship appears to be relatively modest, but the results obtained are robust with respect to a number of different specifications. From a geographical perspective, we found that railroads had a significantly greater influence on regions located in countries on the northern periphery of Europe than in other outlying areas. They also helped the economies of these areas to begin the process of catching up with the continent’s industrialized core. In contrast, the regions on the southern periphery showed lower levels of economic growth, with this exacerbating the preexisting divergence in economic development. The expansion of the railroad network in them was unable to homogenize the diffusion of economic development and tended to further benefit the regions that were already industrialized. In most of the cases, the capital effect was magnified, and this contributed to the consolidation of newly created nation-states.

A comparative spatial history using GIS, this article examines the similar and differing effects of railway expansion on the growth of postal communications in Great Britain and France from 1830 to the eve of the Great War. It argues that the modern Postal Age in Great Britain and France began in the 1830s. In Britain in 1839, the Parliament obligated private railway companies to convey the Royal Mail throughout the kingdom at reasonable rates. Thereafter, the expansion of postal services and railway networks went hand in hand. Over the years, thousands of new post offices were established and were closer to rail stations than before. As the years wore on the geography of postal communication expanded greatly and by 1914 the majority of rural districts became part of the system of regular, daily mail. In France, a country four or five times larger than England and Wales with a relatively vast rural population, the task of modernizing postal service was a greater challenge. The inauguration of a “rural service” in 1829 employed some 5,000 men as postal carriers to deliver and collect mail throughout the countryside. Thereafter, their numbers grew as new post offices were established to serve villages and small towns with mail deliveries every other day. In the 1880s, under the Third Republic, the state greatly expanded the postal service, deeming it a national mission. It was then that the growing rail network came to shape the national geography of postal service. Hence, at the turn of the century the patterns British and French postal expansions converged.

While states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The large-scale analysis of railway architecture is discussed in relation to railway-line ownership, political (central, regional, and local) agency, economic development, and architectural Zeitgeist, highlighting state-building and territorial integration patterns. The mapping carried out reveals two successive architectural layers. These denote a shift in the role of railway architecture from an initial liberal phase, before the 1880s, to a bloom phase, prior to World War I. While during the former there was little state control over architectural aspects, during the latter architecture became a foremost representation instrument for the state railway administration. At the same time, the extant railway architecture appears as a palimpsest, a genuinely cross-border, European heritage, documenting the dynamics between imperial, state, regional, and local agencies.

This article delves into the processes of territorial transformation by foregrounding the material dimension of infrastructure. The entry of the research is infrastructure network design and planning. We will trace the concepts of territorial transformation inscribed into the material layout of large technical systems by analyzing the discourse of engineers and policy makers involved in the conception of infrastructure networks. In so doing, the material politics of infrastructure networks will be studied: How did engineers and policy makers design infrastructure to generate a specific territorial transformation? Moreover, how did technological plans hold the idea that one could influence modernization processes by means of a territorial transformation instigated by infrastructure? The neutral status of technology is thus fundamentally challenged by showing that engineers, in association with policy makers, were essential actors in the planned transformation of the territory as they organized infrastructure networks according to specific ideas relating spatial and societal transformation. The article focuses on two decades after the independence of Belgium (1831), when engineers conceived comprehensive networks of rails, waterways, and roads. The material politics of two major public works initiatives will be analyzed: (1) the centrally positioned railway network that connected all industrial centers within the territory as well as with the markets of neighboring countries, positioning Belgium into Europe as international turntable, and (2) a network of roads and canals in peripheral, so-called unproductive, regions that had to integrate these regions within national borders, and indeed extend these borders, as well as buffer and govern the side-effects and risks generated by the accelerating industrialization in the central parts of the nation.

The initial period of construction of the Spanish railway network is often criticized for its radial structure, centered on Madrid. In this article, the authors describe the role of the state during the initial stage of railway network construction and confirm that although the political will to construct a centralist network certainly influenced its morphology, other social and economic criteria were also influential. With regard to the political motives behind the radial network, the authors argue that part of this interest could have come in response to perceived needs to strengthen the presence of the Spanish state throughout its national territory and to promote a process of state-building. Finally, it must be stressed that the central hypothesis of our article is that the radial structure of the network was a natural consequence of the strategic geographical position of the country’s capital and of the distribution of economic activity within Spanish territory. The article proposes two methodological approaches for evaluating the extent to which the radial design of the network was justified, bearing in mind the locations of Spain’s most productive regions. The results of these two exercises suggest that the radial configuration with which the Spanish rail network was originally designed probably arose naturally as a result of the distribution of economic activity within the country and of the relative advantage that this bestowed on certain regions due to their geographic position.

In 1850, after three decades of political turmoil, Portugal started investing in major public works, particularly, in the construction of a national railway network. This strategy followed closely the suggestions of the Saint-Simonian technocrats with whom Portuguese engineers had been engaging since the 1820s. Additionally, it came in response to the longtime neglect suffered by the Portuguese transportation system, which hindered communications and trade between different areas of the kingdom and with neighboring Spain. The main goal of the investment was to modernize the national transport system, attract to Portuguese harbors a large portion of the traffic between Europe, Africa, and America, and, in general terms, put the nation on the path of progress. By the end of the nineteenth century, total mileage of the Portuguese rail network exceeded 2,300 km. This article analyzes the role of railways in the improvement of communications between the Portuguese provinces, their appropriation in a unified nation-state, the degree of integration of the Portuguese economy with the Spanish and European economies, and the construction/reinvention of Portugal as a modern and technological nation. To achieve these goals, I will use three key concepts: territorial appropriation, circulation, and globalization. Sources include statistics of railway operation and previous works analyzing the impact of railways on the Portuguese transport system and economy, the outcomes of operating transnational lines, and the importance of technology for the reinvention of Portugal during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Barry Eidlin’s book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018) explains why unions are weaker in the United States than they are in Canada, but have not always been that way. Indeed, unionization rates were virtually identical for much of the twentieth century, then diverged in the 1960s. Against dominant accounts focused on long-standing differences in political cultures and institutions, Eidlin argues that the divergence resulted from different ruling party responses to working class upsurge in both countries during the Great Depression and World War II. In Canada, an initially more hostile state response ended up embedding “the class idea”—the idea of class as a salient, legitimate political category—more deeply in policies, policies, and practices than in the United States, where class interests were reduced to “special interests.” In this symposium, three noted labor scholars engage critically with the book. Cedric de Leon interrogates Eidlin’s account of the role of racial divisions in explaining divergence, noting “more persistence and convergence than there is rupture and divergence” between these two countries on this issue. Nelson Lichtenstein’s critique focuses on the exceptionally vociferous character of US employer hostility, which he argues that Eidlin downplays. And Judith Stepan-Norris notes the surprising lack of actual class actors in a book about class organization, while raising interpretive questions about the relation between labor and the Communist Party in both countries. Eidlin concludes the symposium with a response to the critics.