Question

How did the railroad influence Europe colonial powers in the 19th century

Answer 1

(Apex) It allowed them to move people and goods rapidly from place to place

Answer 2

The technological advantages of Europeans over Africans at the outset of the colonial era meant that they could maintain secure military control (the pax coloniala) over much larger territories than had even the most effective indigenous states and also introduce a bureaucratic apparatus for generating the revenue needed to pay for transport construction. The European personnel of these colonial regimes, however, consisted of quite small numbers of men who, whether or not their home governments subscribed to the formal British policy of “indirect rule,” depended heavily upon African collaborators who, in turn, whether school-trained clerks or “traditional” chiefs, remained deeply imbedded within their own societies. The ability of these regimes to raise cash revenues was limited and, for the initial task of building railways and roads, they depended heavily upon requisitioned labor paid at sub-market rates.

These sources of taxation were sufficient to construct railways that provided gains in efficiency of freight carriage more than sufficient to cover their (relatively low) construction costs and thus made possible the export of minerals (especially in Central Africa) and, more broadly, bulk peasant-grown commodities (cocoa, coffee, peanuts, cotton) from what had previously been very remote inland regions.61 Yet in some respects the European nationalist as opposed to global purposes of these railways limited their economic value: some were directed less at markets than at controlling African populations that threatened colonial power; many duplicated the routes of neighboring territories that happened to be under the control of a different European power.

The most “global” of these railways were in Central Africa where they sometimes crossed the territories of different European powers, in order to connect a mining center with the outside world. However, these extractive enclaves often had limited linkage with their surrounding African economies. At the same time all of them sacrificed African interests for European and global ones through their dendritic spatial patterns, connecting various inland zones to ports rather than to complementary regions within the continent. Exports were, after all, the only basis for earning the currency needed to pay the costs of colonial administrative and its transport investments.