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The Great Train Race. Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815-1914. By Allan Mitchell. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. xv + 328 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, maps, tables. Cloth, $69.95. ISBN 1-571-8166-4.
Railway construction in the nineteenth century was not only the necessary condition for industrialization in Europe; it also facilitated the administrative and military aspects of nation-building. From the beginning, three models of national railway systems developed in Europe: first, the British, with unfettered private enterprise; second, the Belgians, with a unified and strictly controlled state network; and third, the German and French mixed system, which combined private and public interests. Mitchell's analysis of the mixed system in France and Germany is promising, because the railways that were built during the first period of the European industrial revolution in both nations are comparable, despite their emergence from completely different traditions: on the one hand, the long-standing etatist tradition of France; on the other, the conflicts of center and periphery before the German nation-state, with its complex structure, was formed in 1871. Mitchell...