Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History
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Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253011862 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2014 |
| Series: | The Spatial Humanities |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Toward Spatial Humanities
Historical GIS and Spatial History
By Ian N. Gregory, Alistair Geddes
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01186-2
CHAPTER 1
Railways and Agriculture in France and Great Britain, 1850–1914
ROBERT M. SCHWARTZ AND THOMAS THEVENIN
Losses year after year and increasing competition indicate that the crops now grown are not sufficient to support the farmer. When he endeavors, however, to vary his method of culture, and to introduce something new, he is met at the outset by two great difficulties.... The first [is] the extraordinary tithe ...; the second is really even more important – it is the deficiency of transit....
It is not too much to say that three parts of England are quite as much in need of opening up as the backwoods of America. When a new railroad track is pushed over [American] prairie and through primeval woods, settlements spring up beside it. When road trains [in Britain] run through remote hamlets, those remote hamlets will awake to a new life.
RICHARD JEFFERIES, "Steam on Country Roads," 1884
AFTER REFLECTING ON AMERICAN AGRICULTURE AND RAILROADS, Richard Jefferies, an agricultural journalist, saw one thing clearly: Britain must catch up. Goods trains in agrarian America, he wrote, stopped not merely at stations but virtually anywhere along the line where there were grain and produce to pick up. The British farmer, alas, enjoyed no such convenience. To get crops and produce to market was a struggle. First, he had to cart them to a railway station – a slow journey of up to ten miles. Then, at the station, he faced a long wait, eventually surrendering "to the middleman to get his goods to market." British trains went from town to town, but they needed to go to the farms and the crops.
"Road trains," Jefferies argued, were the solution. These redesigned steam-powered trains would run not along rails but on country roads, stopping at each farm and "loading at the gate of the field." Railways, he granted, would still be essential for long-haul shipments, but the road trains would bring much-desired change. With speedy transit at hand, farmers, he continued, would plant perishable fruits and vegetables on unused plots, the rural population would grow, and British farmers would recapture revenue that was going to the Continent and America for imports. To break open rural isolation, daily road trains for passengers would connect villages with market towns. Remote hamlets would spring to life.
Casting his eye across the Channel at old rival France was no consolation. France was moving ahead of Britain, too: "We have lately seen the French devote an enormous sum to the laying down of rails in agricultural districts, to the making of canals, and generally to the improvement of internal communication in provinces but thinly populated. The industrious French have recognized that old countries, whose area is limited, can only compete with America, whose area is almost unlimited, by rendering transit easy and cheap. We in England shall ultimately have to apply the same fact."
Jefferies's lament takes us back to a period of crisis and adjustment in the international division of labor and sets the scene for something new: a comparative spatial history that bridges the gap between two research areas typically treated in isolation from one another, one on railways and the other on agriculture. What we discover is a better understanding of change over space and time between rail transport and agricultural production. Although rural rail service was a boon to farming by opening distant urban markets, it also pinched farmers where it hurt, bringing intensifying international competition in foodstuffs to the farm gate. Still, even as competition grew and the agrarian depression of the 1880s and 1890s struck agrarian economies, accessible rail transport often helped farmers adapt to the new market conditions of the globalizing world of the late nineteenth century. Jefferies was unable to see this, even though he accurately depicted the general crisis of confidence in European farming.
HISTORICAL GIS AND SPATIAL HISTORY
Farmers of the period knew very well that their fortunes increasingly depended upon railways and their freight charges. Today, few scholars doubt that railways and agriculture were linked and interdependent, and yet historians concern themselves almost exclusively with one or the other subject. Rare exceptions to this offer valuable insights that we can improve upon in several ways. GIS and spatial analysis make it possible to study larger and more complex bodies of evidence at different scales and over time. Here, our georeferenced evidence comes from large databases on railways, population, and agriculture for Great Britain and France from the 1830s to the 1930s. Another improvement is our use of a comparative approach to investigate patterns of change within and between states the better to identify and explain both similarities and differences in countries that had differing political economies, a difference reflected in agricultural policy by British free trade and French protectionism. In this period of globalizing markets, comparative history is all but indispensable for understanding the position of any geographical area and its producers in its relation to the shifting international division of labor – a need underscored by its absence in much of the literature on the agrarian depression of the late nineteenth century.
Among historians of British agriculture there is a consensus that the depression in Britain was not a "general crisis" in agricultural output but one that varied by region and that struck the cereal-growing regions of the south and southeast much harder than elsewhere in England and Wales. Debate continues, however, as to whether or not British agriculture "failed" to meet the challenges of intensifying foreign competition. "Pessimists" point to the demise of large, more productive farms, a lack of innovation and entrepreneurial savvy, and the government's complacent dependence on imports from the bountiful agricultural resources of the United States and Britain's colonies. As more regional research is undertaken, "optimists" argue that resilience, not failure, characterized English farming in difficult circumstances. The role of rural rail transport in response to the agrarian depression in this literature, whether it is optimistic or pessimistic, is usually absent or mentioned only in passing.
The same is true in research on French agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century. By and large, studies of agricultural performance and the depression in particular concern themselves with the national level alone, and studies of specific regions are only beginning to appear. Meanwhile, debate over French agriculture echoes that over British farming. French pessimists marshal evidence old and new to demonstrate that French agriculture lagged behind Britain and most of western Europe. Optimists respond with new data and arguments that the French system of small farming was more rational and productive than commonly thought. Within France itself, a long-held generalization is that in agriculture – as in industry – the country was divided between the developed north and the less developed south. On the issue of regional disparities, new opportunities for comparative spatial history abound, thanks in part to Jean-Claude Toutain's work on regional variations in productivity growth from 1810 to 1990. One major finding was that north-south disparities narrowed after 1860 and that growth rates in the two regions converged at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, owing in large part to the increased productivity of the wine and market-gardening sectors in the south. Toutain's data and argument bring welcome attention to the issue of agricultural restructuring after 1850 and renew debate. One recent article, for example, argues, rather unpersuasively, that regional specialization of the kind that developed in Britain was largely absent in France from 1870 to 1914. In fact, the issue calls out for further research. In our larger work we answer the call, showing that the geographic restructuring of French agriculture was much facilitated by railway expansion. Although we do not pursue the broader patterns here, our analysis of the Department of the Côted'-Or in Burgundy illustrates our approach.
With our problem in its historiographical frame, we can now consider tools and methods. How can our questions about spatial relationships and changes over time be systematically addressed? Time was when studying the influence of proximity in social relations was a hard row to hoe, and one had to limit either the size of the study area or the sample of data. Today, GIS and geographically referenced data reduce these previous constraints and open new possibilities in spatial analysis using visualization, cartography, and spatial statistics. In this case, encoding the geographic coordinates in each unit of analysis makes it possible to calculate many different aspects of distance, proximity, accessibility, and transport cost when joined with GIS data on the development of railways and rail stations from the 1830s to the 1930s. Using georeferenced information on agricultural production and land use attached to British counties, registration districts, and parishes and to the corresponding units of French administration – departments, cantons, and communes – gives us comparable data at these several scales of geographic resolution.
Now we turn to specific questions. Which communities in a given rural area were ten miles or farther from a railway station, the condition Jefferies characterized as lamentable? Over the years, which villages continued to fall into the "distant" category, as opposed to those that, with rail expansion, came to be "near" a station, having five miles or fewer to get their crops to a shipping point? Further, how was proximity to rail transport related to change in the use of agricultural land, to the shift from arable farming to livestock and dairy farming? The combination of GISand spatial analysis brings the examination of these complexities within reach.
BACK TO THE STORY: THE AGRARIAN DEPRESSION AND THE RAILWAY SYSTEMS OF BRITAIN AND FRANCE
The Depression
Many of his contemporaries agreed with Jefferies's concerns about the inadequacies of Britain's rural rail transport services. British services were woefully outmatched by those in the United States and might be overtaken by those in France as well. This insufficiency seriously undermined the British farmer's ability to survive the agricultural depression and withstand intensifying international competition in foodstuffs from America. The signs of difficulties emerged in the mid-1870s, when a series of cool and rainy summers led to bad harvests and cattle diseases that reached a crisis point in 1879. In the same period the first wave of American grain exports arrived in Britain and other European countries, forcing the price of wheat in particular to lower and lower levels until a mild recovery began in the mid-1890s. From 1873 to 1882 American exports of wheat rose from 40 to 150 million bushels, displacing Russia as the chief exporter of cereal grains. The largest share came to Britain. Well before then, English interest in American agriculture had produced an outpouring of articles and reports, a fair number having been written by authors who had observed American farming firsthand. Many reports were written by James Caird, a member of Parliament and the main force behind the establishment in 1866 of the annual collection of British agricultural statistics. Touring America in 1858, he described the Midwest as "the greatest track of fertile land on the globe." In 1881 a royal commission was set up to study the agricultural depression in England and Wales. Recognizing American imports as one of the causes of this depression, the report charged one of the commission's members, John Clay, to gather evidence in the United States and report his findings. His report lauded the workings of American wheat production and American rail, calling them at one point "miraculous." Other Europeans from France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia who came to study the American system agreed with Clay.
In France the Ministry of Agriculture's interest rose to new heights in 1889, when the agricultural displays at the Universal Exposition in Paris caused astonishment at the prodigious agrarian capacities of the United States and other New World countries. In an 1891 report the enviable efficiency of the American system was described in some detail. In the wheat trade, good yields on enormous acreages, cheap transport, and the American system of grain elevators worked harmoniously, like a gigantic, well-designed machine. The rail system alone was as huge as the country, and its growth was remarkable. With more than 160,000 miles in operation in 1890, the U.S. rail system "has more than 19 times as much railway line today as it did 30 years ago." In 1890 the figures for the much smaller countries of France and Great Britain were about 23,000 and 18,000 miles, respectively.
Railways and Rural Transport
By 1890 railway expansion in England and Wales had developed more than Jefferies was willing to admit. At the end of the 1880s there were few rural registration districts – a market town and surrounding parishes – that lacked a station and some connection, however indirect, with the national system. Indeed, rail service began to reach the countryside in the late 1850s and 1860s, twenty years before Jefferies wrote "Steam on Country Roads." Using the HGIS data on British railways and population yields a more precise description in graphical and cartographical displays. After calculating the distance in kilometers from the center of each parish to the nearest railway station at a given date, a mean of the parish scores is calculated for each of 633 registration districts; then the district means for each date are classified by different levels of district population density. Figure 1.1 shows the pattern of increasing accessibility over the decades: except in the least populated districts, proximity to a railway station continued to increase until the turn of the twentieth century, especially for communities of modest population density (twenty-five to one hundred persons per square kilometer). Interestingly, Jefferies took this history so much for granted that he ignored it in his writings.
In Jefferies's assessment of the British system, a major deficiency was the long distance between the farmer's field and the railway station; Jefferies cited a journey of up to ten miles as not uncommon but regrettably inconvenient and outdated. Among the farmers he consulted, there were no doubt a goodly number who complained of this inconvenience. Still, had he traveled through French villages during the same period, he would have learned that the complaints of British farmers were small potatoes indeed. In fact, a comparative study of British and French rail networks suggests a more positive story of rural railway development in England and Wales than Jefferies would have us believe (see figure 1.1a and table 1.1).
In railway development France was a decade or more behind Britain. A county four times larger than England and Wales, France had a good deal more territory over which to lay down rails, to connect major cities and ports, and to reach country towns and the approximately thirty thousand rural communes in which the bulk of its population still lived and worked. Compared to Wales and the English Pennines, the uplands and mountains of the French south, the Pyrenees, and the Alps presented more formidable topographical and financial challenges. Moreover, the French pace of industrialization was relatively slow, agricultural productivity in two-thirds of the country was low by British standards, and the nation's defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870–71 had been a costly humiliation that siphoned off tax revenues to pay substantial reparations to the new German Empire.
In 1878, in the aftermath of defeat and the French state's desire to catch up with America and Britain, the government of the new Third Republic, much as Jefferies reported and praised, launched a huge project to expand the French rail system into the countryside. Named after its chief proponent, the minister of public works, Charles Freycinet, the program, in addition to the expansion of main lines, included state subsidies to promote the growth of secondary lines designed to serve rural and agrarian communities. A decade later, in the 1890s, the projected expansion of "lines of local interest" got under way, and the pace of construction quickened, culminating in the 1920s. Railway accessibility in the relatively vast territory of rural France lagged, accordingly, behind Britain, but the gap continued to narrow after 1870. By 1900 villages in moderately populated cantons (between twenty-five and fifty persons per square kilometer) were on average within three miles of the nearest railway station (see figure 1.1b).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Toward Spatial Humanities by Ian N. Gregory, Alistair Geddes. Copyright © 2014 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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