Gordon Pirie

PASSENGER TRAFFIC IN THE 1930S ON BRITISH IMPERIAL AIR ROUTES: REFINEMENT AND REVISION

In the 1930s, far fewer passengers traveled on the airline that served the British Empire than conventional data implies. The passenger traffic pattern was also more complex than has been indicated in the literature. Recycled secondary records based on figures aggregated to boost the airlines image inflated national passenger loads and hid the share of paying vs. non-paying passengers. This paper offers and discusses reconstituted data that shows temporal and geographical variations in passenger loads. Passenger information relating to air route segments allows reappraisal of the role and impact of Imperial Airways.

Im)measurable Transport History

In the ‘Surveys and Speculations’ section of this issue of the Journal of Transport History, a prominent historian of Indian colonial railways refers to methodical and meticulous railway record keeping in the subcontinent. He notes the many analyses of Indian railway performance and impact which rely on that remarkable mass of bureaucratically generated data. He also remarks on the different paradigms and technologies that have guided research at various times. The fidelity and integrity of field and office data (and of proxies and estimates) are an endless source of puzzlement and debate for purists. So too is the meaning of numerical data after aggregation and statistical manipulation. Ignorant and willful misrepresentations of raw and processed empirical data about transport are not unheard of, particularly when the investment stakes are high. When transport projects and information are politically charged or toxic, one should expect deceit and dissembling in the archive. All scholars grapple with making reasonable deductions and inferences from imperfect information. Knowing the nature and limitations of data collection, coding and summation is key. Understanding what kinds of information have been preserved and how they have been curated is important. It is imperative to pay careful attention to geographic scale and context: what may hold nationally may not hold locally; what may apply in one part of the world may not apply elsewhere. How then to assess the significance of any past transport service or any transport infrastructure project? This issue of the JTH articulates findings across different modes and moments of transport in South America, Central America, the Indian subcontinent, South East Asia, Europe and the Atlantic. Kerrs interjection concerns a major new effort to gauge the impact of Indias railways. Using the power of Geographic Information Systems, the inquiry he responds to falls within the ambit of ‘big data’ research projects that are catching the attention of scientists and research funders. But the research leaves many questions unanswered; it remains unclear whether railways were ‘on balance’ a good thing in and for India. The same might be said of road building in Mexico in the mid-twentieth century: Besss paper argues that, at the time, unfavourable local impacts did not always mesh with the wider national interest. Whereas ambivalence might dominate in the Mexican case, failure is the central message in Rousseaus paper about forty-three years of French colonial involvement in railway building in Indo-China. Conversely, success is the central thrust in Williams and Armstrongs examination of the steamboat in early-nineteenth-century Britain. In all instances, longand short-term interests need to be weighed; parochial and national benefits must be considered.

Revolutionary Limits in Transport

The three research papers and four commentaries on exhibitions and museums in this edition of the Journal prompt thoughts about ‘revolutions’ in the transport past, specifically their literal and metaphorical engineering and their reception at the time and retrospectively. Note, incidentally, how several familiar notions in transport permeate the vocabulary of change: ‘revolution’; ‘fork in the road’; ‘turning point’. Referring glibly to a singular national or continental ‘transport revolution’ has long been a handy way of indexing the mesmerising changes wrought by mechanisation of land and water transport in the nineteenth century. Historians of transport know full well the pitfalls of this sort of popular but crude labelling. Revolutions are seldom exhaustive and instantaneous. We recognise them best with hindsight. They occur at varying pace and with diverse consequences in different places. Some breaks in ‘traditional’ transport have been resisted. ‘Pre-revolutionary’ forms of transport retreat into market niches where they may survive for decades. Enormous changes (on a spectrum from inevitable to avoidable: organic, spontaneous, planned, contrived) have unintended consequences. Transport revolutions don’t stop at dramatic changes in vehicle and infrastructure engineering: organisations change correspondingly. There are also sweeping shifts in energy use, transport personnel, travel, and transport financing, to name but a few. Transport institutions and governance change. Retail bodies adapt to the new transport assemblages and formations. Life’s tempo and rhythms change. Horizons widen. Settlements spread. New resource frontiers emerge. Landscapes alter. In time, histories are written which attempt to record and explain the ‘revolutions’ and to use that knowledge as another window on innovation and its diffusion, and on humanity. Such is the complex, contested, dynamic history of transport pasts. There is a sense, now, that revolutions in transport may be a thing of the past: relatively sudden shifts after long periods without change seem to have been replaced by continuous and almost imperceptible technological evolution. It can be difficult distinguishing between innovation in machinery, design and materials, and specifying which kind of changes constitute radical rather than incremental change. The challenge is grist for at least some transport history scholarship. Gradualism might also be the future despite entire corporate engineering laboratories experimenting obsessively on product development. Mimicry to the very limits of patents is the order of the day. National and international design and operating agreements, decades of sunk investment in infrastructure, and concern for user tastes, market share and product obsolescence also count against radical change. Excepting, perhaps, for truly ‘Green’ transport, recent and future significant changes in transport may have less to do with unimagined technology

Transport Instrumentalities: Legacies and Levers

The six papers in this issue of the Journal of Transport History are a reminder about the ways in which past transport has been used for both mobility and non-mobility purposes. Transport provision and use has unquestionably had effects that reached beyond mobility. Somewhat misleadingly, it has become custom and categorically convenient to distinguish the ripples from their source. The signifi cance of transport ‘machines’ and infrastructure has always extended beyond carrying people and commodities. Intentionally or not, trains had political and ideological effects, and surely not only in the Antipodes. Cycling in Europe (and surely not only there) was politicised, resting on an ideological base and leaving an ideological trace. Paternally invoking the ‘good’ of various publics (nations, cities, electorates, communities) has long been a way of validating transport investment. Transport, indeed, was instrumental in achieving political goals and cementing public and personal values. Similarly, it has been instrumental in achieving other non-mobility goals such as work provision, economic growth, land appreciation, and social upliftment, for example. The instrumental legacy of past transport is inscribed in the built environment most evidently. In the case of museums and memories, the instrumentality of past transport continues to resonate: past transport activity that enabled other activity is restaged (actually or imaginatively for the observer by the curator) in the present to serve some other purpose, be it technical, artistic or social. These (time-warping) instrumentalities are metaphorical. They are reverberative in a broader and different way to the sounds and vibrations created by churning engines, spinning wheels, and burning fuel. The immediate instrumentalities of transport belong to the locomotives, ships, aircraft, road vehicles, bicycles and the like that have moved commodities and people successively faster, safer, further and in increasing numbers. The following papers prompt refl ections on both the instrumentality that is integral to machinery, and on the instrumentalities wrought prior and subsequent to its manufacture, during conception, design, use, or later on display. The complexities are profound; the cacophonies and echoes are multi-layered. The varied shape, scale, appearance, cost, and operating characteristics of transport devices does not diminish or privilege any particular instrumentality. Their size and reach means that humble bicycles have not been geopolitical tools like railways, but there is no mistaking the political machinations behind bicycling. No single hand can hold any transport tool in its entirety as an instrument but, historically, hands—and minds—have manipulated even vast vehicles and vessels entirely and intentionally. Proximity to the