Colonial India, its railways, and the cliometricians

摘要

Railways lend themselves to enumeration. Much of what railways are or do can be counted, and statistical analysis has long been a central tool in the management of railway systems. From the accumulations of numerical data associated with reconnaissance and final surveys through the details of construction and onward to the cornucopia of numbers associated with every detail of railway operation the numbers pile up and, in many jurisdictions, remain preserved within voluminous bodies of historical records. In aggregated and disaggregated forms, these massive bodies of numbers-many of which exist in serial runs extending to a century or more-offer a research paradise to the cliometricians (be they historians, geographers or economists) and a forbidding hell to the innumerate.