The Intercontinental Railway and the Contentious Production of Knowledge

This presentation examines how the idea to build the ‘Intercontinental Railway’, a railroad that was supposed to run from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, placed transportation and mobility at the heart of Inter-American relations. Until well into the 19th century the United States showed little interest in establishing close relations with Latin America. Many US-Americans believed that the region was underdeveloped and politically unstable. However, when the financial crisis of 1873 triggered an enduring economic recession, U.S. authorities, businessmen, and manufacturers started to look south for new markets. By 1890, this trend had developed into Pan-Americanism, a movement that advocated inter-American political, commercial, and cultural cooperation. Most historians have interpreted Pan-Americanism as the “friendly face of U.S. dominance in the Hemisphere” (Sheinin 2000). Meanwhile, they have largely overlooked one central aspect in the history of Pan-Americanism, the planning of intercontinental transportation infrastructure. Challenging the present scholarly argument that the Intercontinental Railway was just another failed imperialist infrastructure, I argue that a historical analysis of its planning offers new perspectives on the transnational production of knowledge. Focusing on the work of the Intercontinental Railway Commission in the early 1890s, I show how professional and cultural divisions within the commission resulted in antagonistic viewpoints on the significance of expert knowledge and exact data. Members agreed that they needed information on topography, local transportation, urbanization, and trade to build the railroad. They quarreled, however, over whether information on those subjects could better be gathered at the office desk or in the field, whose knowledge they needed, and which role local experts would play in the planning and construction processes. The presentation demonstrates that competing knowledges of railroad planning and attempts to assert professional authority informed the development of the first intercontinental transportation infrastructure project in the Americas.