"In the second half of the nineteenth century, railway fever had infected Russia, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. In India, the first lines connecting Bombay, Calcutta and Madras opened in the early 1850s. Ten years later, the sub-continent had a railway network of 2,500 miles, nearly 4,800 in the 1870s, and 16,000 miles in 1890. For Marx, the development of Indian railways was a powerful illustration of his vision of traditional and archaic social forms shattered by the advent of modern, conquering industries. ‘Indian society’, he wrote in 1853 in the New York Daily Tribune, ‘has no history at all, at least no known history.’ Its providential destiny was to be ruled and, from this point of view, the British Empire, as violent and brutal as it was, would undoubtedly have more fruitful consequences than its competitors, the Russian and the Ottoman empires. In India the British colonizers had two missions, ‘one destructive, the other regenerating: the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.’ Steam had severed the sub-continent from ‘the prime law of its stagnation’ by connecting it with the advanced world. Very soon, he predicted, this joining with the West through ‘a combination of railways and steam-vessels’ would demolish the bases of Oriental despotism. Railroads were destroying the archaic social system of the country, which was grounded on the ‘self-sufficient inertia of the villages’. The article’s conclusion swept away any doubts: ‘The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry."