Railroads,Politics, and Comparative History

Abstract

Practitioners and students alike of systematic comparative history, within as well as across national boundaries, do well to familiarize themselves with the classic 1928 essay by French medievalist Marc Bloch on the need for comparative studies in European history. Bloch identifies two basic criteria for constructive and fruitful comparison: first, a certain similarity or analogy between observed phenomena-that is obvious; and second, a certain dissimilarity between the environments in which they occur.' Historian Colleen Dunlavy and sociologist Frank Dobbin clearly satisfy both criteria in their studies of railroad development in the United States and Europe during the nineteenth century. Indeed, it is hard to imagine more apt focus than railways for historical comparison across national boundaries in the Western world of the 1800s. Dobbin characterizes railroads as one of the modernizing industries in Britain, France, and the United States (cover flap); and Dunlavy, citing historian Alfred Chandler, emphasizes that railroads constituted the first big business in Prussia as well as the U.S. (pp. 35-36). To be sure, as is obvious to Dobbin and Dunlavy, the comparative method need not privilege analogies between historical phenomena as more significant than dissimilarities between their environments. More often than not, systematic comparative analysis leads to more precise appreciation of what Bloch terms the originality of each society under scrutiny.2 That is to say, the analytical interplay between comparison and contrast can yield clearer and more precise appreciation of what is distinctive in the historical experience of each local, regional, or national milieu. Such has been the case with the most highly acclaimed monographs of international comparison by U.S. scholars, from Carl Degler's Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race