Abstract
This issue is a collection of papers regarding methodology in transport history. These papers represent the answer to JTH’s CfP launched in 2020 on the topic of transport history ontologies.
Many of the papers making up this Special Issue, not too surprisingly, have a strong focus on the spatial dimension of transport, as well as on the politics of mobility. Although those foci are not new, it is interesting to note how this opens up new research avenues and broadens the field’s horizons.
In this vein, this Special Issue not only offers food for discussion but is also a positive sign of the fruitful ongoing discussion about refreshing our research tools and approaches in transport and mobility history. Far from being an arrival point, this Special Issue aims to further trigger the debate, and The Journal of Transport History is simply keen to offer space for more discussion.
The first paper, by Govind Gopakumar, focuses on the historical imagination of transport. Using the case of the city of Bengaluru, the author targets the concept of “usable past” and its application in pre/post/colonial histories. Here, the idea of “displaced past” offers an angle to better contextualise the usable past, and eventually to question how much the (mobility) past in colonial and post-colonial countries may not necessarily be “usable”. This critical approach is based on the ubiquities of frictions and resistance to mobility (openly referring to Cresswell’s ideas), all driving to an intriguing concept of “Displaced Past”.
Giovanni Favero, Michael-W. Serruys, and Miki Sugiura also address the spatial element of mobility, in their case on the 1980s Urban network theory, it is “an incomplete mapping of hinterlands and the prevalence of neo-Christallerian model”. The authors propose to further build on an “urban logistic network”, to focus on “the interaction between urban systems on one hand, and transport and mobility on the other”. This approach better bridges “urban history and transport history”, therefore making movement(s) a core focus in understanding the urban landscape and its networked connectivity.
In his paper, Daniel Normark openly writes about ontology, taking the case of the mobile-ICT versus the Intelligent Transport System. The author claims that the latter has a managerial approach and the first a more collaborative stance. These different ontologies define a strong dissonance in implementing new mobility regimes, and this conflict reveals also, more subtly, “how ontologies enacted is part of our understanding of mobility”. Thus “these ontologies are not limited to the fields of ITS and mobile-ICT but are rather a common trope in the techno-politics of transport and mobility and subsequently a topic for transport history”. Following his reasoning on ITS, “transport [including transport history] perception is under the spell of ‘managerial’ thinking – resulting in the obsession of time – and budget-savings or caught in a progressive story of control.”
I am tempted to say that James Fowler also addresses (transport) institutions and management, but his paper has a different angle. Here, more than management, Fowler focuses on the politics of mobility and uses the analytic lens of hybridity, historical institutionalism, and institutional logics. Doing so lets the author suggest “that by explicitly framing the history of public transport as a political process, historians can engage with a wider social ecology of interest groups than those represented by economic interests”. Applying this concept “enables a mass of qualitative data from the archive and the political status of transport institutions to be explicitly rationalised rather than worked out by implication from economic data”.
David Turner and Thomas Spain offer their contribution, discussing food logistics. Their paper uses the case studies of UK milk distribution and the international quail market, to address the notion of scale (local versus global), as well as discuss the driving force in the logistics chain. The case of milk distribution resonates with the ideas discussed in other papers presented here, and it shows the entangled elements of technology, management, and geographies. The case of the quays pushes that argument further. The industrialization of the sector, and the growing consumption, required more quays, which resulted in new markets, that is, a large logistics network. This new situation backfired, reducing the number of birds (that is, irreversible environmental impacts), which required the industry to target new areas, that is, again, increasing logistics efforts, leading to more and different mobility.
Hugo Pereira presents his work on photographs in transport history. His arguments go beyond the classical use of images in describing past events, focusing on the use of photography as a way to define perceptions and representation of mobilities, and contribute to (colonial) territorial appropriation. In this way, the images embed both power and spatial elements, allowing us to “analyse the dimensions of places (and the transportation and mobility fluxes associated) as relationships, placing of people and materials, and/or the hierarchies of difference that follows”.
The last paper on ontology is written by Colin Pooley on the individual experience of routine journeys. In echoing Cresswelĺs similar concept, Pooley offers logbooks as a way to extrapolate the travellers’ experiences of their movement. The author clusters those experiences in emotions, accidents, weather conditions etc., giving us “the human scent” in transport history. The paper implicitly addresses the duality of transport: the contradictory experiences (sometimes liberating, sometimes taxing) show how the very concept of mobility is both an empowerment and a burden.
This JTH issue also hosts another paper, Zaf Segal’s paper on “The naturalisation of nineteenth-century German Railways as depicted in visual discourse”. Although this last paper was not conceived as part of the Special issue on methodology, JTH readership will find very inspiring ideas therein.