The Alps – Modernization and Resources
The modernization of the Alps that began in the last part of the nineteenth century unfolded as a process of transformation that was very much ambivalent in character. Infrastructural development not only connected resources and centres of production in the Alps to extensive trade networks and markets for raw materials and other valued commodities, but also robbed many people of their means of subsistence and suppressed existing ways and methods of production. This journal issue investigates how the modernization process in the Alps was bound up with the expansion and reorientation of infrastructures, which allowed the discovery of new natural resources and their extraction, export and capitalization within the wider economy ...