Cultures of transport: representation, practice and technology

Despite its development in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea that transport history could be at the cutting edge of historiographical research seems hardly credible today. This article argues that the `cultural turn' that has remodelled so many other areas of the humanities and social sciences may help recreate an innovative, even controversial, transport history. It would not merely bring the discipline into line conceptually and methodologically with what has been going on elsewhere. By focusing on the practical limits and historical capabilities of transport technologies, the new historiography would have something of relevance and value to say to such other fields.