Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Transport is the quiet engine of globalization, and Lange is naming it with a politician’s cool, structural clarity. He’s not marveling at trains and steamships for their novelty; he’s pointing to the way mobility rewires power. When goods, people, and information move faster and cheaper, “the world market” stops being a metaphor and becomes an operating system. Borders still exist, but they increasingly function like speed bumps, not walls.

The phrasing “opportunity for division of labor” is doing double duty. On its face it’s optimistic, almost technocratic: specialization raises productivity, prosperity spreads, everybody finds their comparative advantage. Underneath, it’s a warning disguised as an invitation. “Division of labor” at a global scale also means a hierarchy of roles: some countries design, finance, and set standards; others extract, assemble, and absorb the environmental and social costs. Lange’s inclusion of “most of the undeveloped states” hints at the coercive side of this “opportunity” - integration isn’t purely voluntary when transport links follow imperial routes, creditor demands, and strategic interests.

Context matters: Lange lived through the high tide of European imperial trade networks, World War I’s supply-chain militarization, and the uneasy interwar push for international cooperation. Read from that era, his sentence captures a central contradiction of modernity: the same infrastructure that knits economies together can deepen dependency and make conflict more systemic. He’s describing a world becoming one market - and implicitly asking who gets to write the terms of trade, and who gets written into them.