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The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain. By Mark Casson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xvi + 523 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, figures, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $90.00. ISBN: 978-0-521-76790-3.
Reviewed by Chris Wrigley
Mark Casson, one of Britain's leading business historians, has written an innovative study of Britain's pre-1914 railway network. As a professor of economics, he brings to his study model-building skills as well as economic theory. As a business historian he places the development of railways in Britain in the context of broader business history. He also has the benefit of a huge knowledge of railway history, county by county. He has drawn on this erudition to construct a detailed model counterfactual railway system. In The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain Casson goes well beyond previous studies.
Casson praises the social savings approach developed by Robert Fogel in Railroads and Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964) and Gary Hawke in Railways and Economic Growth in England and Wales, 1840-1870 (1970). While these studies analyzed alternative transport systems, Casson produces...