Railway mobility: social history and implementation practices

Abstract

The article raises questions of the social history (history of institutionalization) of railways and railway mobility (or mobility of railway passenger's), which are becoming popular in the English-speaking sociology of transport, which is the reason for mainstreaming this topic in Ukraine. The questions raised are considered from the point of view of empires’ history, in particular, Great Britain, where the institutionalization of the internal railway, and later of railways in the colonies, led to the development of not only English, but also world industry, and at the same time contributed to world socio-cultural development, including the development of warfare. Our goal is to provide the reader with a preliminary introduction to a large series of books published under the general title “Studies in Imperialism”, where there are works on the institutionalization of railway transport, in particular the passenger railway, their functions, etc. The series is dominated by the idea that imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had the same significant impact on the dominant society as it did on the dependent one and that the development and operation of railways is a direct consequence of imperial ideology. It was the imperial ideology of the institutionalization of railway transport both in the metropolises themselves and on the colonized territories that gave rise to contradictions of the social order, including massive outrage, as it led to radical institutional and mental changes associated with the traditional space and time orientation of local residents, limited them in the right to voluntary movement, accustomed to movement according to someone’s and somewhere developed schedules and life according to the principle of movement from work to work, etc. Finally, the authors make a conclusion that all this fit into the postulates of the ideology of modernization and rationalization of public life, but was interpreted in terms of the colonization of others living space/time, as it accustomed to the appropriate life regime and not only while travelling by rail.