A World History of Rail from the Steam Regime to Today

There were 20,000 miles of railways in 1865 and about a million by 2020. Scale has always been a key theme in railway history. In WWI, the London and North West Railway transported 325,000 miles of barbed wire and over twelve million pairs of army boots. At the end of the 20th century, Indian Railways sold 4.5 billion tickets annually. With his renowned ability to take the long view of any subject and bring it into sharp focus for the reader, Jeremy Black examines how rail transformed the world. While always shaped by commercial interests, the role of the railway was (and is) strategic in the broadest sense: like Roman roads and Chinese canals, it helped develop the economic links that sustained and strengthened the major powers. Is it possible to overestimate the impact of the railway in history? Jeremy Black analyses that impact from the beginning to today.