When Distance Died: The Transport Revolution and Its Discontents
- didiermoretti
- Nov 16
- 12 min read
Before the late nineteenth century, the world was lumpy. It was a planet of pockets where, for millennia, distance was destiny. Travel moved at the speed of horses and sailing winds—perhaps thirty miles per day if you were lucky. A letter from London to Calcutta took four months and risked shipwreck. A person born in a rural village would likely die having traveled no farther than fifty miles from home. Markets remained stubbornly local, and cities couldn't grow beyond the radius their hinterlands could feed them. Everything beyond that small circle might as well have been on the moon.
Then, in the span of just two generations, steam power shattered every assumption about time, space, and economic possibility. What followed wasn't just faster travel. The world fundamentally restructured itself around velocity, reorganizing where people lived, what they ate, how they worked, and which communities thrived or withered.
The Railroad: Shrinking Continents and Creating National Economies
The speed and scale of railroad deployment between 1870 and 1914 represents one of the most intensive infrastructure investments in human history. While early railways had existed since the 1830s, it was in the decades after 1870 that they truly became transformative networks, spiderwebbing across continents with relentless ambition. In 1870, the world had roughly 130,000 miles of track; by 1910, it had over 600,000. In the United States alone, tracks ballooned from a paltry 23 miles in 1830 to over 250,000 by 1916—enough to lasso the moon. (1)
This wasn't just more track; it was smarter, stronger, and more systematic. Steel rails replaced brittle iron, allowing for heavier loads and faster speeds. Standardized gauges meant a wagon loaded in Lisbon could, in theory, roll all the way to Vladivostok.
The quantitative impact was staggering. The cost of shipping goods by land plummeted. In the United States, the freight charge for a bushel of wheat from Chicago to New York fell from 37 cents in 1868 to 12 cents by 1900. Suddenly, the vast, fertile plains of the American Midwest could feed the burgeoning cities of the East Coast and even the industrial towns of Britain, profitably. This simple fact unleashed a torrent of economic consequences. It turned American agriculture into a global export powerhouse, but in doing so, it bankrupted countless small-scale farmers in rural England who simply couldn't compete with the deluge of cheap grain.
This points to a crucial qualitative shift: the birth of national, and even international, markets for everyday goods. Before the railway, an economy was a patchwork of local cells. A glut of potatoes in one county could coincide with a famine in the next, with no practical way to connect supply and demand. The railway smashed these barriers. A butcher in London could now plan his menu around Scottish beef, delivered fresh overnight. A factory owner in Manchester knew he could sell his textiles just as easily in Bristol as in his hometown.
Railroads didn't just enable market integration; they created something new: continent-spanning monopolies. Before railroads, businesses were inherently local or regional. Coordination across vast distances was too expensive and slow. Railroads changed this by making centralized management of geographically dispersed operations feasible for the first time. These weren't traditional monopolies based on scarce resources or legal protections. They were logistics monopolies, built on controlling the choke points of the new transport networks to crush regional competitors. In 1880, Rockefeller's Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of American refining. The monopoly wasn't built on better oil; it was built on better logistics. (2)
Governments struggled to respond. Traditional antitrust thinking assumed competition would emerge naturally. But when scale advantages from transport networks were so enormous, competition died quickly. In the US the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 attempted to regulate railroads, mostly unsuccessfully. (3) The real lesson took decades to learn: when infrastructure creates winner-take-all dynamics, markets don't self-correct.
Time Became Synchronized
The integration driven by railroads demanded a new kind of consciousness. To coordinate this intricate ballet of locomotives, a shared sense of time was essential. Before the 1880s, every town in the world kept its own local time, pegged to the midday sun. This was charmingly parochial but maddeningly impractical for a network that needed trains to actually not collide. An infamous anecdote tells of a traveler in Bristol missing his train to London because his watch was set to Bristol time, which was a full ten minutes behind the capital. Multiply that confusion by thousands of stations, and you have chaos.
The solution, imposed by the railway companies out of sheer necessity, was the standardization of time into zones. In 1880, British railways officially adopted Greenwich Mean Time. (4) In 1883, the major American rail corporations met and sliced the continent into the four time zones we know today, effectively willing a national clock into existence. People began to live not by the sun, but by the railway timetable. It was a profound psychological shift, subordinating natural rhythms to the mechanical cadence of the industrial age.
The Steamship: Plummeting Freight Rates and Connecting Continents
What the railway did for land, the steamship did for the sea. The transition from sail to steam was more gradual, but its consequences were just as revolutionary. The early steamships were coal-guzzling behemoths, often relegated to short, high-value routes. But a series of innovations in the latter half of the century—the compound engine, the steel hull, the screw propeller—dramatically improved their efficiency and reliability. The largest steel-hulled sailing ships displaced between 2,000 and 5,000 tons—more than double the capacity of typical wooden-hulled vessels. This increased capacity was accompanied by dramatic reductions in shipbuilding and operating costs.
The numbers tell one part of the story. Between 1860 and 1910, ocean freight rates fell by over 70%. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a waterway specifically built for steamships, was a geographic shortcut that shaved nearly 4,000 miles off the journey from London to Mumbai, turning a perilous months-long voyage into a predictable 25-day passage. For merchants, this didn't just cut costs; it eviscerated risk. This reliability was perhaps even more important than speed. A merchant dispatching wool from Australia by sailing ship in the 1860s was making a huge bet against the weather. His cargo might arrive in London in 90 days, or it might take 150, or it might not arrive at all. The steamship transformed this gamble into a calculation. Its arrival time was predictable, give or take a day or two.
This predictability, coupled with the invention of refrigerated shipping (the first successful shipment of frozen meat travelled from Argentina to France in 1876), utterly transformed the global diet. Suddenly, a working-class family in Manchester could afford Argentine beef and New Zealand lamb. The world's peripheries became the larders for its industrial core. This created immense wealth for ranching oligarchs in the Pampas and colonial farmers in the Antipodes, but it also locked these regions into a dependent economic relationship with Europe, the long-term consequences of which are still being debated.
Or take the humble banana—a fruit so perishable it was virtually unknown outside the tropics until the early 1900s. The United Fruit Company, armed with refrigerated ships and its own railroad networks in Central America, turned bananas into America's most popular fruit by 1910. The company didn't just sell bananas; it rewired Central American economies, built private railroads, influenced governments, and created entire mono-crop societies dependent on export markets thousands of miles away. A fruit that couldn't survive a three-day journey became the foundation of nations—which should have been a warning sign, really.
The First Globalization Boom
Growth Took Off
The transport revolution delivered exactly what it promised: cheaper goods, greater mobility, integrated markets, and explosive economic growth. The First Globalization boom from 1870 to 1913 witnessed GDP growth rates that had never been sustained globally before in human history. Real wages in industrializing countries rose 50-100 percent. Latin America achieved 3.48% annual GDP growth (1.81% per capita)—rates that would double living standards in less than 40 years. Western Europe grew at 2.10% annually (1.32% per capita), while the United States and other Western Offshoots surged at 3.92% (1.81% per capita).
This combined effect of railroad expansion and maritime improvements triggered an unprecedented explosion in global trade volumes. World merchandise exports as a percentage of GDP for developed countries rose from approximately 5.1% in 1850 to 11.9% in 1913—more than doubling the trade-to-output ratio. (5)
Steamships and railways became the physical internet of the 19th century
This trade boom created new economic superstars. Powered by this new shipping capacity, Ghana catapulted to become the world's largest cocoa exporter by 1911. (6) Argentina, leveraging its vast pampas and refrigerated steamships, saw its real exports increase by over 500 percent from 1869 to 1914, transforming it from a backwater into one of the world's ten richest countries. The geography that had protected their competitors for centuries vanished in the time it took to build a refrigerated cargo hold.
The transport revolution also birthed new industries, such as tourism. Thomas Cook, a teetotaling Baptist minister, organized the world's first package tour in 1841: a train excursion for 540 sober souls to a temperance rally, complete with tickets and ham sandwiches. This humble jaunt spawned a travel empire, proving that transport could commodify leisure as easily as coal. (7) By shrinking space, transport didn't merely facilitate trade; it invented new forms of it, turning isolation into interdependence.
Industries Reorganized Globally
The combined effect of the railway and the steamship was a massive reorganization of global production. Industries were no longer tethered to their source of raw materials or their local market. Steel mills, once confined to areas with abundant local iron ore and coal, could now be located near deep-water ports, importing raw materials from across the globe and exporting finished goods just as widely. This led to the rise of massive industrial hubs and a new international division of labor.
The steamship, along with the submarine telegraph cable that often followed its routes, stitched the continents together. A colonial administrator in Nigeria could send a query to London and receive a response in a matter of days, not months. This tightened the grip of empire, allowing for a degree of centralised control that was previously unthinkable. It also fostered a new global consciousness. When the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the news, carried by telegraph and steamship, circled the globe in days, creating one of the first truly global media events.
Technological Changes Accelerated
The new infrastructure did more than move goods and people; it moved ideas at unprecedented speed. Steamships and railways became the physical internet of the 19th century, shrinking the lag between an invention in one continent and its adoption in another from years to weeks. A chemical fertilizer developed in a German lab no longer remained a local curiosity; it could be enriching Argentine soil within a single season.
This created a virtuous feedback loop. Railroads enabled farmers to adopt new technology (like mechanized plows and barbed wire). This technology boosted productivity, creating surpluses. The surpluses were shipped by rail or ships, generating profits that funded... more technology and more transport infrastructure. This is how the "Great American Desert" became the world's breadbasket in two generations. It wasn't just the railroad; it was the railroad acting as a high-speed deployment system for a package of innovations: mechanized reapers, barbed wire, and hardy new wheat strains, all arriving in the same boxcar.
Industrial tech spread even faster. A new loom design patented in Manchester could be rattling away in a Boston mill a few months later, installed by a skilled engineer who had traveled there by steamship. This rapid diffusion of knowledge was arguably as crucial to economic growth as the inventions themselves.
Cities Ate The Countryside
Before cheap transport, cities faced hard biological limits: they couldn't grow beyond the distance their food supply could travel before spoiling. London in 1800, with a million people, was already straining against this constraint. By 1900, it had 6.5 million—fed by grain from Canada, and dairy from the countryside, delivered twice daily by rail.
The transformation was more than demographic. It was a fundamental power shift from rural to urban, from landowners to industrialists, from dispersed populations to concentrated ones. In 1870, 75 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. By 1920, half lived in cities. This wasn't wanderlust; it was the rail system making urban migration economically rational for the first time.
A farmer in rural Nebraska wrote to a newspaper in 1890 complaining that the railroad had "stolen our children." His meaning was literal—the train station made leaving possible, and his children, seeing no future in subsistence agriculture, left. The railroad companies advertised heavily in rural areas, promising jobs and excitement in distant cities. They weren't selling train tickets; they were selling escape routes.
The flip side was urban chaos. Cities grew faster than their infrastructure could support. Tenements overflowed. Sanitation systems failed. Mortality rates in rapidly industrializing cities were often higher than in the countryside—but people kept coming because industrial wages, however brutal, beat rural poverty. The train didn't just enable urban growth; it made it inevitable, even when cities were nightmarish.
Winners, Losers, and Backlash
This new world hummed with unprecedented efficiency and growth, but it was also a world of brutal disruption. The same forces that allowed a factory in Germany to sell its machinery in Chile also exposed a local German artisan to competition from a more efficient factory in Britain.
The great annihilation of distance was also the great annihilation of economic shelter. Railroads and steamships triggered a synchronized global price collapse for agricultural commodities. Wheat prices fell 50 percent between 1870 and 1900. A farmer in Kansas now competed directly with farmers in Ukraine and Argentina—not because trade policy changed, but because transport costs dropped below the threshold where distance mattered.
The winners were urban consumers enjoying cheaper food and distant producers with land advantages. The losers were farmers everywhere, watching their protected markets evaporate.
This spurred a political backlash. As cheap American grain flooded Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, farmers rioted, and governments in France, Germany, and elsewhere abandoned free trade policies in favor of agricultural tariffs to protect their rural populations. The transport revolution, in knitting the world closer together economically, paradoxically sowed the seeds of modern economic nationalism.
Efficient, Productive, and Fragile
The reliability and scheduling capabilities of railroads and steamships enabled entirely new forms of economic organization. This was the 19th-century version of just-in-time logic. Manufacturers could maintain lower inventory levels, confident that inputs would arrive on predictable schedules. The railroad's ability to maintain timetables—impossible with animal-powered wagon transport—enabled coordination across multiple production stages and locations.
Fresh food—previously an extreme luxury outside harvest season—became normal for urban populations. This was no small thing. For millennia, most people ate preserved, salted, or dried foods most of the year. The economics were transformative. Farmers could now specialize. The old model—mixed farming, producing a bit of everything for local sale—became obsolete. California specialized in oranges and grapes. Florida in winter vegetables. Kansas in wheat. Specialization drove productivity gains, which drove prices lower, which drove more specialization. The flywheel spun faster every year.
But specialization meant vulnerability. When transport disruptions hit—and they did, during strikes or harsh winters—entire cities faced food shortages within days. The system was more efficient but more fragile. A city of 6 million couldn't survive a week without daily supply trains. Geography stopped mattering, but logistics became everything.
Most ironically, the same infrastructure that connected the world also made war catastrophic. Railroads allowed nations to mobilize millions of soldiers and transport them to fronts with unprecedented speed. World War I—powered by rail logistics that could feed, arm, and replace soldiers faster than they could be killed—became the bloodiest conflict in history precisely because the infrastructure of commerce worked too well for violence. Progress, it turned out, was politically neutral about its applications.
People Gained Freedom of Movement... And Voted With Their Feet
Perhaps the most profound change was people's freedom of movement. Transport's democratizing force unleashed torrents of people chasing dreams across oceans and borders. The Age of Mass Migration (1850-1920) saw over 55 million Europeans decamp to the Americas, with the U.S. alone absorbing around 30 million. Steamships made this feasible: cheaper tickets and faster voyages lured the huddled masses. Between 1870 and 1910, this wave was so vast it accounted for nearly 20% of the entire U.S. population growth. (8)
This was not just a European phenomenon. More than 20 million people emigrated from China, creating vast diasporas, and millions more left India and Japan. This was not all people chasing their dreams voluntarily; the period also saw a vast increase in indentured servitude, with many coerced into forced labor. (9)
Railroads also made workers mobile. Before cheap transport, workers were functionally stuck. Moving to another city for work required weeks of travel and substantial savings. The railroad changed all that. This mobility terrified employers and governments alike. Workers could now organize across regions, threatening strikes that paralyzed national networks rather than local shops. The famous Pullman Strike of 1894 involved 250,000 workers and halted rail traffic across the American West—unthinkable before railroads connected workers into a national labor force. (10)
But the contradiction was that while transport made labor mobile, empowering workers, it enabled capital to become even more mobile. When labor organized and won wage concessions, factories could relocate to regions with cheaper labor, using the same rail networks. The same infrastructure that enabled worker power also enabled capital flight. Mobility cut both ways, and capital could move faster.
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(9) More than 500,000 Chinese "coolies" were coerced into forced labor, and a similar number of Indians were coerced into servitude. To add insult to injury, the US passed the "Chinese immigration restriction act" in 1888, to severely limit immigration from China into the United States.
