Tracks across Continents, Paths through History
Regular price
€72.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Douglas J. Puffert
Author_Douglas J. Puffert
Category=KNG
Category=TRF
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_tech-engineering
Product details
- ISBN 9780226685090
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2009
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A standard track gauge - the distance between the two rails - enables connecting railway lines to exchange traffic. But despite the benefits of standardization, early North American railways used six different gauges extensively, and even today breaks of gauges at national borders and within such countries as India and Australia are expensive burdens on commerce. In "Tracks across Continents, Paths through History", Douglas J. Puffert offers a global history of railway track gauges, examining early choices and the dynamic process of diversity and standardization that resulted. Drawing on the economic theory of path dependence, and grounded in economic, technical, and institutional realities, this innovative volume traces how early historical events, and even idiosyncratic personalities, have affected choices of gauges ever since, despite changing technology and understandings of which gauges are optimal. Puffert also uses this history to develop new insights in the theory of path dependence. "Tracks across Continents, Paths through History" will be essential reading for anyone interested in how history and economics inform each other.
Douglas J. Puffert teaches economics at the King's College, New York.
