Once Within Borders (9780674973916) by Maier Charles S

Author:Maier, Charles S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674059788
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Railroads quickly became, openly or not, state projects. Eighteenth-century administrators believed that agricultural productivity was crucial for sustaining state and society. The Netherlands and Britain and later the United States believed that commercial seaborne success was also critical and maintained the naval power they believed necessary for successful maritime ventures. Railroads, too, were urgent for strategic needs, as the Prussians understood early on and the French learned painfully in the war of 1870. Nation-states were reknit in midcentury by virtue of heightened international competition.26 Technology provided new opportunities for the application of military power, such that state prestige, national purpose, territorial maintenance, and railroad projects (along with telegraph and steamships) could no longer be divorced, even if states supposedly abjured ownership of the rails. But how should they be paid for? Private investment was never enough; nor were the great finance houses of London—so important for loans the world over—an unlimited resource. The railroad demanded state subsidies even when private companies had the right to build the lines. Tax and tariff and resource policy had to be shaped—and in effect new national-financial policies developed. The railroads were necessary for the nation; a more centrally organized and activist nation necessary for the railroads. This was as true for France, Italy, Argentina, Canada, and the United States as for Germany and later Russia.27

Early rail projects in the 1830s and 1840s attracted authorities who wanted short prestige lines and investors who envisaged a source of commercial success alongside canals, rivers, and roads. In Britain, Parliament authorized the expropriation of land, rural and urban, needed for right-of-way. The legislature repealed the Bubble Act in 1825, allowing investors to organize corporations without an act of parliament or royal charter. But to buy or expropriate land still required parliamentary approval. Landowners resisted the cutting up of their estates, the intrusion of surveyors and crude construction gangs, the interruption of the hunt, and the competition for canals. Companies had to buy off noble landowners in particular, but negotiate continuously—some gentry understood how to extract very high prices for patches of land. The Eastern County Railway paid Lord Petre the grand sum of £120,000 for a small tract—he sold not only acreage as proprietor but his ongoing influence in the Lords. If no agreement was reached with landowners, the companies could appeal to juries where they might finally be authorized to seize the right-of-way for a stipulated price. Railroad agents insisted they paid more than the lands were worth; by the mid-1840s, landlords felt they were being coerced. Small proprietors felt they did not have the bargaining power of the larger gentry; the railroad companies felt that the sheriffs’ juries would side with their local owners. But despite an escalation of claims and counterclaims, the general upshot was a cash settlement both sides could agree on.28 The railroad firms insisted that absolute property rights did not exist. A country that probably protected property more effectively than any other in Europe was now lectured that land was entrusted to its proprietors for the common good.

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