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Railroads, Germs, and Gold

This chapter covers the introduction of more assertive policies to govern the international border at the turn of the twentieth century that were replacing long-pursued laissez-faire practices. It examines the framing of local disputes over territorial boundaries in national terms as well as the reorganization of customs and sanitary borders as part of a general evolution toward a territorial boundary. In particular, the chapter takes a look at how the introduction of railroads not only reorganized space but also cross-border relations and national development. After the construction of the Great Siberian Railroad had begun in 1891, Russia made use of railroad diplomacy to wield imperial influence in China's Northeast—at a time when a number of powers began to compete fiercely over influence in Northeast Asia. Russia's vehicle in this struggle for supremacy, the Chinese Eastern Railroad, was not simply a joint Sino-Russian railroad company that happened to operate on Chinese soil, but a colonial railroad, which in its Russian (and later Soviet) comanagement represented a typical expression of informal imperialism.