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• Transport historiography: features and sources
• What kind of transport history do we need?
• The origins and developments of transport history in Europe and America
• Transport History in Italy

What kind of transport history do we need?

In the studies about transport, historiography of the single means of conveyance always remained prevalent, with a predominant position of the railways followed by the maritime navigation. The historians often forgot that the infrastructures of transport must be analyzed in an overall sight in order to understand their economic and social effects. The concentration in some sectors of transport instead of others led to a narrow vision of the movement in each territory, made it ignored the concept of “network”, and therefore caused a scarce knowledge of the traffic on the roads, of the coasting trade, of the inland navigation, of the air navigation, of the pipe transport.

At present, the need is that of history of the movement of people and goods in the space, among different places, while less interest presents the history of railways, ships, roads, motor-vehicles, aeroplanes, which give a limited view of the economic and social change. Such histories are too limited also for the recent research of environmental history, tightly linked to transports, which are very important both for the production of pollution and for the consumption of energy, and even for the modelling of the landscape.

We need, at the different geographical levels, history of transport network and mobility contained in the general history. While transport history would have to be taken into account by general historians, as it was demonstrated, with masterly skill, in the work by F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, one of the few in which transport is perfectly embodied in the narrative and interpretation of events.

In order to obtain that historians consider transport also in researches about other sectors, we need to develop transport historiography, proving that transport is very important in each historical fact, in peace and war. But we need also to provide more information and data regarding the system of mobility in each period and in each area.

About transport, the present historiography needs more detailed studies of the markets of passengers and freight, to answer some questions: why passengers and consignors of commodities chose one form of transport rather than another? What degree of competition there was? Why one prevailed or why more than one went on existing side by side? Least but not last, which was the degree of mobility in a territory, in a period, in a society?

About the specific field of passengers, we need to learn much more about “tourism”, productive of great economic and social changes in contemporary age. In a few words, “we need history of the movement of people and things between places” (M. Robbins, The progress of transport history, in “The Journal of Transport History”, March 1991, p. 85).