Mapped railway dreams, geographical knowledge and the Norwegian Parliament, 1845–1908

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to examine the interrelation between maps and politics in Norwegian railway planning between 1845 and 1908. The author presents a historical discourse analysis with a focus on the Norwegian Parliament. The main finding is that maps were strategically used in the debates on railway construction and seldom criticized. Those with interests in railway building regarded mathematical precision and detailed maps as tools to ‘master’ snow, overcome distances and topographical obstacles, as well as to build the future nation. For these interests, the maps seemed to provide neutral proof of the course that they deemed nature itself recommended. Three main types of railway maps were published and discussed in written parliamentary proceedings: maps of alternative lines, maps of railway networks, and topographic profiles. These maps were both the product and producer of a modern way of describing the earth, namely a ‘technocratic geography’, meaning geography as a call for transformation and a matter of planning. The author concludes that maps and geography were political matters in Norwegian railway planning in the period 1845–1908. Railway politics not only generated new maps and new geographical knowledge but also contributed to a new understanding of geography itself as starting point for transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• mathematical precision
• parliamentary proceedings
• railway maps
• railway politics
• technocratic geography

Acknowledgements

The research was funded by the Research Council of Norway partly under the project ‘Nasjon, region og landskap i norske jernbanedebatter’ (‘Nation, region and landscape in Norwegian railway debates’), which ran in the period 2011–2015 (Project no. 205158), and partly under the project ‘Locative Technologies and the Human Sense of Place’, which started in 2019 and will end in 2023 (Project no. 287969). I thank Erling Sandmo (1963–2020) for invaluable conversations on maps and words, and the worlds they make.

Notes

1 Literary quotations in this article have been translated from Norwegian by John C. Anthony.

2 This article builds on my doctoral thesis of 2016 at Humboldt University of Berlin, a revised version of which was published in 2019 (Fojuth 2019).

3 Parliamentary documents are referenced in this article according to their official standard designations, referring to the type of document, number and year, e.g. Dok. (‘Dokumenter’ = diverse documents); Indst.S. (‘Innstillinger til Stortinget’ = Proposals to Parliament); St.Prp. (‘Stortingsproposisjoner’ = Parliamentary Bills); St.Tid. (‘Stortingstidende’ = Parliamentary Journal, i.e. the written minutes of the parliamentary debates).

4 For the whole map see Supplementary Fig. 1.

5 e.g. St.Prp. Nr. 81 (1848), 40; St.Prp. Nr. 74 (1857), 56; St.Tid. 1872, 550, 559; Dok. Nr. 30 (1875), 22; Indst.S. VI (1875), 32; Dok. Nr. 8 (1894), 7; St.Tid. 1908, 2642, 2672

6 Similar examples can be found in St.Tid. (1894), 165 and St.Tid. (1908), 2869.