The “veins and arteries of the country” Imagined and actual exclusion from railway connectivity in Bulgaria, 1878–1908

Abstract

The Bulgarian Principality, established in 1878, witnessed serious contentions over railway accessibility. The central planning state, through its de facto practices of catering to local interests, polarised regions contending against one another. It also witnessed strife between rich and poor articulated in class-based party politics as well as intra-elite struggles between traditional and new elites, fought out in the sphere of cultural capital. Claims to rail accessibility and its gains were expressed in social Darwinian, ethnic, nationalist, economist and socialist discourses. By contrast, the factual division of the railway network into state-run and privately operated services evoked a sense of unity. The Orient Railways served as Enemy Within due to its multinational ownership and profit-oriented policy, first under Maurice de Hirsch's control and later the Deutsche Bank's. This “negative integration” served to gloss over the many social, ethnic, ideological and regional fault lines running through the country which the central state had not managed to bridge.