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The political problem of backlash is analogous to the economic problem of producing from a common pool. When a society has an asset that it uses in common, overusing it can destroy its value, and private economic incentives militate toward overusing a commonly-owned asset. To keep claims on the polity from overly destabilizing production, political deals that work, like economic common pool deals that work, may not be pretty and may not be efficient when compared to the ideal. These problems are best illustrates by the destructive drilling in the East Texas oil fields in the 1930s.

This chapter describes how computers were introduced into two transportation industries: railroad and trucking, describing also the use of computers in these. It discusses applications, how work changed, and the extent of deployment in each.

This chapter reinterprets Louis Brandeis's role in the crisis of progressive era railroad regulation. While others have implicated Brandeis in the crisis, the essay shows how he identified fatal flaws in Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ratemaking and proposed a coherent alternative. Brandeis showed how rate-of-return regulation made false promises to measure the objective value of railroad property and gave the railroads perverse incentives to increase costs. Drawing on the work of scientific manager F. Lincoln Hutchins, Brandeis proposed to replace valuation with a benchmarking system by which railroads could compare their performance. Drawing on his work in Massachusetts natural gas, Brandeis proposed to set rates according to a system of ‘sliding scales’, in which railroads received higher dividends when they provided lower rates. In theory, Brandeis's system was superior to rate-of-return regulation because it provided railroads with incentives to improve and information, unavailable from the firm or the market, about how to improve.

This chapter examines the Compromise of 1877 between Republicans and Southern Democrats involving railroad subsidies that would extend Thomas Scott's Texas and Pacific Railroad into their districts in exchange for making Rutherford Hayes president. Initially documented by C. Vann Woodward in Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1954), the Compromise of 1877 involved not only the removal of federal troops from the South but also promises of federal aid to railroads. The compromise collapsed after Hayes became president and refused to provide railroad subsidies to the South. This chapter considers how the collapse of the Compromise of 1877 led Texas Democrat John Reagan to introduce a bill that culminated in the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It also explores the ramifications of railroad regulation championed by Reagan for American state formation.

This chapter describes how ranchers, miners, investors, laborers, railroad executives, and innumerable economic actors integrated the border into an emerging transnational economy and began to create binational communities on the boundary line. With the completion of the first transborder rail line—brought on by the joining of the Sonora Railway and the Arizona and New Mexico Railroad at the international boundary line—ranchers and miners secured an easy way to move stock and ore to markets. As more people realized this, the borderlands experienced nothing short of a capitalist revolution. The capitalist development of the borderlands would, in turn, spur the creation of an array of new transborder ties. By the early twentieth century, the border has become a point of connection and community in the midst of an emerging capitalist economy and the center of a transborder landscape of property and profits.

This chapter summarizes how the Southern Pacific Railroad affected the course of human affairs in its territories. Its contributions to water supply, environment and resource conservation, land grants, agriculture, and irrigation are highlighted. The chapter also shows the decline experienced by American railroads after the Second World War; the Southern Pacific Railroad is shown to be one of the most affected companies. It notes that the Southern Pacific Railroad effectively shut down on September 11, 1996.

This chapter studies how Delta blacks confronted the rapid growth of the railroad as the one of the most important and visible engines of economic progress and racial segregation in the region. It shows how they integrated the sensory experience of traveling by rail into their spiritual lives and created new words, visions, songs, blues lyrics, and sermons based upon it; converted forsaken depots into houses of worship and waiting platforms into revival stages; and took advantage of train travel to organize regional gatherings of individual churches and spread news and gossip about leaders and movements. By popularizing railroad travel as a metaphor for African American freedom, Delta blacks eventually refigured its popular symbolism as a vehicle of racial restriction.

This chapter talks about when the authors entered the one-time Western Pacific Railroad rail yard in Sacramento. It was October 20, 1995, thirteen years after they had first jumped on a train from the same place. They walked the tracks, climbed atop railcars, sat in the shadow of the icehouse. It was a reunion: they had not seen each other or talked by phone very much for a few years. They had grown a bit estranged because their 1980s had been so fierce—each of them was a reminder to the other of troubled times. In the 1980s, they had covered the war in El Salvador, where they had some bad experiences, and the revolution in the Philippines, among a slew of other intense projects. They had also produced two more books on poverty in America.

This chapter details Hardwar’s mundane history, gleaned from multiple sources. For centuries, Hardwar’s primary attraction was a spring bathing festival—which has drawn larger numbers for the Kumbha Mela at least since the late 1600s—but this pattern shifted late in the 1700s. During the early nineteenth century, the Hardwar fair (the bathing festival) was also north India’s largest marketplace, creating unprecedented wealth. Later, the Upper Ganges Canal and the railroads radically altered Hardwar’s local and religious environment. Each major change also generated conflict—whether between the warrior ascetic bands (akharas) that battled for control over Hardwar’s rich marketplace, or for control over Hardwar between local elites and a colonial administration worried that festivals were breeding grounds for cholera epidemics. The most important struggle came in 1914–17, when Hindu groups led by Madan Mohan Malaviya forced the British to modify plans to dam the Ganges.

The chapter discusses the naming conventions which showed various signs of deference, condescension, and even affection towards blacks and whites. Customs and even laws served to segregate the two races. Nonetheless, humane relations still existed between whites and blacks but such instances were regarded as exceptions. Rural race relations were delineated affecting every aspect of life in the New South. Segregation was fast becoming the norm and segregation laws swept the nation. The railroad system was the point of most contention as regards segregations as it was the main form of transportation during that time. Racial discomfiture sometimes leads to overt conflict and even violence. Thus, statewide railroad segregation peaked during this time. The chapter also discusses the significant change on interracial social relations particularly in terms of sex and marriage.

This chapter explores the origins of global equity markets that in fact have deep historical roots. Stocks were created to finance trade and expansion overseas as part of the European imperial project, yet prior to the imposition of direct rule. Later, equity finance in the industrial era brought together large amounts of capital to finance industrial projects overseas such as railroads, electric projects and water projects. The structure of global equity markets mirrored the structure of the markets within the colonial metropole; hence the chapter emphasizes the role ofand linkages with British, French, and Dutch colonial rule.

This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the early career of William G. Brownlow and of his decision to locate in Knoxville in 1849. It then presents a snapshot of the town at mid-century, creating a sense both of the physical space and of the people who lived there. The chapter examines socioeconomic patterns of wealth, occupation, race, and ethnicity; assesses the vital importance of railroads to the town's development; and introduces several of the key figures who will play important roles in the drama soon to unfold. In the backdrop are two attendant themes: the emergence of Knoxville as the commercial hub of East Tennessee, and East Tennessee's decided sense of inferiority relative to the wealthier areas of Middle and West Tennessee.

This chapter focuses on Henry Meiggs, a Yankee engineer who profited from the California gold rush before becoming the Golden State's most notorious debtor. When his high-stakes financial gambles collapsed in 1854, Meiggs fled San Francisco for South America, where he built an extravagant new life replete with a million-dollar mansion and an entourage of devoted followers. He traveled to Peru, where he pioneered the enganche debt peonage system and coordinated an unprecedented geographical rearrangement of Latin American commerce, demography, and mobility. As the so-called Yankee Pizarro of Latin America, Meiggs reshaped Chile's working class by recruiting and relocating thirty thousand Chilean workers to build the first railroad lines across the Andean Cordillera. A majority of the debt peons who toiled on these high-altitude engineering projects eventually migrated to Chile's Atacama Desert, where they mined the sodium nitrate that fertilized California's turn-of-the-century citrus bonanza. Meiggs was thus a human vector, precipitating both exchanges and influences between California and Chile.