By the last decades of the nineteenth century the three countries on which we are
focusing, England, France, and Germany, all possessed more tightly integrated
national spaces, linking together regions and their components – towns,
cities, countrysides, people, resources – through networks structured in
remarkably similar ways. Everywhere railroads and telegraphs were creating
conditions for the rapid spread of modern industry, and a new species of
nationally organized parties gave a changed character to politics. Sharing
common institutions and frames of action (in culture too, as will be seen later
on), all three places seemed in many ways to be traversing a shared path to
modernity. Yet the diverse earlier patterns of development generated by the
differing configuration of networks we have sought to describe still made
themselves felt, giving a distinct quality to life in each place, and in
particular to the relations between bourgeois or middle-class people and those
with other social identities. In this and the next two chapters we consider the
particular path each country followed as it achieved this tighter mode of
integration, the distinct kinds of industrial modernity and party politics each
evolved, and the forms and limits of bourgeois power that ensued.
Industrial growth and the limits of precocious integration
The two-sided story in which England appears at once as the pioneer industrial
nation and the model for others from late in the eighteenth century, and as
following a rhythm more like that of France and Germany than has often been
recognized, achieving a modern industrial economy only from around 1870, is well
exemplified in the crucial topic of railroad building. Railroads were a key
element of modern industry because of their importance first as a means for
improving the speed and reducing the cost of transport for both people and
goods, and second as a powerful stimulus to metal production and manufacturing
more generally. Britain embarked on building railroads markedly earlier than any
other country, and by 1850 the United Kingdom had almost 10,000 kilometers of
track, nearly twice the German number and three times that of France at the same
date – especially remarkable given her smaller size.