What Makes Transportation History

Abstract The idea that societies progress from rickshaw to railroad has been ubiquitous in discourses of colonialism and technological determinism since the nineteenth century. While historians of colonialism have debunked these discourses in specific cases, the question of why transportation came to be such a common sense measure of historical change has been left untouched. This article argues that “transportation” has a history. From eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political-economic philosophy in Europe, Japan, and the United States, to rickshaw puller movements in early twentieth-century Japan, to the emergence of transport devices as museum objects in the 1960s, “What Makes Transportation History” shows how transportation came to be understood both as the foundation for economic life and as a measure and maker of linear and irreversible change over time. This process did not exclude those who approached transportation as a livelihood. Rather, battles with rickshaw pullers and other transportation workers naturalized the idea that the needs of transport’s producers must be subordinated to the needs of transport’s consumers for modern societies to progress.