A FRENZY OF NATIONS
In September 1825 a rail line was established that linked Stockton to Darlington in Britain. In May 1835, on the continent, Brussels was tied to Malines. That September in Bavaria the Nuremberg-Furth line was laid. Next were Paris and St. Germain. Far to the east, in April 1838, Tsarkoe Selo was connected to St. Petersburg. For the next three decades or more, railroad workers stitched one region to another.
The French historian Charles Moraze” explains: “The countries which were already almost united in 1830 were consolidated by the coming of the railway . . . those still unprepared saw new bands of steel . . . tightening around them….. It was as if every possible nation washastening to proclaim its right to exist before the railways were built, so that it might be acknowledged as a nation by the transport system which defined the political boundaries of Europe for over a century.”
In the United States the government awarded vast land grants to the private railroad companies, inspired, as historian Brace Mazlish has written, by “the conviction that transcontinental roads would strengthen the ties of union between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.” Hammering hi the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental rail line opened the door to a truly national market—integrated on a continental scale. And it extended the actual, as distinct from nominal, control of the national government. Washington could now move troops quickly all across the continent to enforce its authority.
What one saw, therefore, hi one country after another, was the rise of this powerful new entity—the nation. In this way the world map came to be divided into a set of neat, nonov-crlapping patches of red, pink, orange, yellow, or green, and the nation-state system became one of the key structures of Second Wave civilization.
Beneath the nation lay the familiar imperative of industrialism: the drive toward integration.
But the drive for integration did not end at the borders of each nation-state. For all its strengths, industrial civilization had to be fed from without. It could not survive unless it integrated the rest of the world into the money system and controlled that system for its own benefit.
How it did so is crucial to any understanding of the world the Third Wave will create.
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