Transport history methodology: New trends and perspectives

Abstract

This issue is a collection of papers regarding methodology in transport history. These papers represent the answer to JTH’s CfP launched in 2020 on the topic of transport history ontologies. Many of the papers making up this Special Issue, not too surprisingly, have a strong focus on the spatial dimension of transport, as well as on the politics of mobility. Although those foci are not new, it is interesting to note how this opens up new research avenues and broadens the field’s horizons. In this vein, this Special Issue not only offers food for discussion but is also a positive sign of the fruitful ongoing discussion about refreshing our research tools and approaches in transport and mobility history. Far from being an arrival point, this Special Issue aims to further trigger the debate, and The Journal of Transport History is simply keen to offer space for more discussion. The first paper, by Govind Gopakumar, focuses on the historical imagination of transport. Using the case of the city of Bengaluru, the author targets the concept of “usable past” and its application in pre/post/colonial histories. Here, the idea of “displaced past” offers an angle to better contextualise the usable past, and eventually to question how much the (mobility) past in colonial and post-colonial countries may not necessarily be “usable”. This critical approach is based on the ubiquities of frictions and resistance to mobility (openly referring to Cresswell’s ideas), all driving to an intriguing concept of “Displaced Past”. Giovanni Favero, Michael-W. Serruys, and Miki Sugiura also address the spatial element of mobility, in their case on the 1980s Urban network theory, it is “an incomplete mapping of hinterlands and the prevalence of neo-Christallerian model”. The authors propose to further build on an “urban logistic network”, to focus on “the interaction between urban systems on one hand, and transport and mobility on the other”. This approach better bridges “urban history and transport history”, therefore making Editorial