Technology and Culture

Peter Pyne's The Panama Railroad is a cogent, well-researched work about the challenges of building modern infrastructures against hostile environments in the mid-nineteenth century. He also shows that his book fills a void, noting the absence of recent studies on the history of the Panama railroad and citing a handful of much older texts published before 1970. The narrative is highly readable and avoids jargon but tends to be more descriptive in its study of this history and lacks a deeper historiographical engagement with scholarly literature on Panama and socioeconomic themes related to Latin America.

The book is organized into three sections. Initially, Pyne introduces readers to the lives and activities of the individual managers and capital investors who oversaw construction of the Panama railroad. He contextualizes the scope and aims of the endeavor: in 1849, emerging victorious from its war against Mexico, the U.S. government wanted to integrate its new territories in the west. Congress provided some incentives for mail carriage, but individual investors raised additional funds to set up their operations. William H. Aspinwall, one of the masterminds of the project, devised an ambitious network of sea and rail transportation that allowed ships to dock at Pacific or Caribbean ports, unload their goods, and ship them overland on the 47-mile rail line, saving months of additional sea travel around South America. The most complicated challenge faced was cutting through the thick jungle canopy populated with poisonous reptiles and innumerable mosquitos that tormented laborers and spread disease (p. 134). Another critical challenge was the plan itself; the project's initial organizational structure relied on thirdparty contractors who competed on price for work. The original contractor underestimated the cost of laying track in Panama, producing a budget that made it difficult to recruit workers (pp. 33–34). Pyne shows that this error caused setbacks that forced the company to reorganize operations to see the work to completion.

Pyne then turns his attention to the thousands of laborers who built the railroad. He synthesizes extensive records to develop an understanding of this population. Unsurprisingly for the era, managers applied a racialized framework that determined wages and social hierarchy. Although white workers from the United States and Europe were the highest paid, Pyne finds a more complicated situation for other groups. Due to high turnover from disease, the company was forced to raise wages to recruit and retain nonwhite workers. They arrived from Jamaica and other British colonies in the West Indies but also included hundreds of Chinese, Indians, and Malaysians. [End Page 1189]

The final part of The Panama Railroad continues the narrative on laborers but focuses readers' attention on Irish immigrants. Pyne finds that of the 17,500 employees, only 360 were contracted from Cork, Ireland; however, he estimates that almost 4,000 men hired from U.S. cities were likely Irish born. He arrives at this figure by studying U.S. labor demographics from the nineteenth century and other sources. An entire chapter is dedicated to the "men from Cork." Pyne is an Ireland-based researcher, and he makes good use of the sources available, but the decision to cordon the narrative on Irish workers into a separate section was a mistake. After having covered workers' lives and living conditions in detail in the previous sections, the author raises some repetitive points here and weakens the book's narrative flow.

It seems natural to compare Pyne's work on the Panama railroad to the famous canal that came decades later. The U.S. canal builders benefited from the knowledge of previous endeavors as well as advances in sanitation and epidemiological research that improved health conditions. In contrast, the railroad's builders had none of these advantages. They were true pioneers, setting up operations to bring a new technology to a hostile natural environment. While he cites many of the important works on the history of Panama and building the canal, his engagement with their arguments is superficial. As a descriptive narrative, Pyne's work captures the challenges the railroad...