Trade and Transport

This chapter has three aims. The first is to show that twentieth-century transport technologies have had a key role in creating global markets and the circulation of knowledge and people, but have not solved the problem of uneven access to mobility at both the local and the global level; in the course of the last century, transport technologies were instruments of political oppression and war, segregation and conservatism as much as they were symbols of free movement and democracy. The second aim of the chapter is to illustrate the historical evolution of transport technologies since 1918, concentrating not only on how and why people and goods have moved, but also on how individuals and collectivities have imagined and made sense of their movement: transport technologies enabled systems of knowledge and representations which are the central focus of this chapter (Mom 2003; Clarsen 2015). The third aim of this chapter is to show that transport technologies are the material infrastructures that organize the space in which human beings live, allowing and constraining their movement, and, in doing so, they inform individual and collective identities (Sheller, Urry 2006: 207; Divall, Revill 2005: 102).