Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State by Jo Guldi (review)

Roads to Power presents a striking argument about the government’s role in Britain’s road system. In 1726 the roads of Britain were “mire and muck,” whereas by 1848 “the road system consisted of forty-foot-wide highways of level gravel that extended to every village and island in the nation” (1). This transformation, it is argued, was brought about through government action, starting with the “military technology” applied to military roads in Scotland from 1726 (17). Turnpike trusts adopted that technology (new methods of sighting, foundation building, labour management, and trigonometric surveying), but were confined to major London routes and “a few major English arteries” in the 1750s and 1760s and were absent from Scotland and Wales until the nineteenth century; moreover the trusts inhibited trade by making long-distance carriage “prohibitively expensive” (87, 17). The moving force was the government: “Through the crusading of Scottish landlords, Parliament was pressed into the task of building roads for the entire nation. Within ten years, the turnpikes were superseded by an interkingdom highway system” (17). Moreover, “government spending, stateappointed experts, and an army of clerks and surveyors oversaw the coordination of standardized designs for roads and the circulation of standardized forms specifying the details of construction, down to the exact dimensions of each piece of gravel on every road surface in the farthest village” (4); “appointed surveyors … sent paper forms testifying about their repairs back to engineers in the nation’s capital” (1). By the 1830s there were also “standardized inns and packhorse syndicates” (2).

This process led to the rise of a bureaucratic state governed by experts—and earlier than historians have previously realised. Unfortunately, the state’s experts, such as Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam, provided only better political persuasion rather than better construction, and without regard for cost. Their work therefore generated opposition, and in 1848 the forces of localism triumphed over the centralists, the government “abandoned its roads,” and the British economy was “dismantled” (4, 201); Scotland “plunged back into a preindustrial subsistence economy” (23). The main conclusion of the book is that central provision of infrastructure by the state is necessary: “Without state building, economies never expand to a national scale, peripheries are left behind, and the poor cannot afford to participate in the market” (19). According to these arguments there was a state bureaucracy intervening decisively in the economy well before the Victorian period, and a far-reaching reversal of policy in 1848.

Roads to Power’s emphasis on the role of government differs radically from all previous accounts of Britain’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roads. Jo Guldi does not engage with those previous accounts but instead sets out evidence which, by implication, they have disregarded. Unfortunately, each leg of the argument falls once the evidence is examined. First, military technology was not the basis for the turnpikes’ work, unless defined so widely as to include, for example, road levelling. Little attempt is made to trace the transfer of military technology to turnpike and parish surveyors, or to show what impact it made, other than by stating without evidence that John Metcalfe singlehandedly made foundation-building standard throughout Britain. Far from building military-style gravel roads with thick foundations, McAdam regarded foundations as unnecessary at best. (Nor were his methods expensive, except in two exceptional urban cases.) No examples are provided of parish surveyors adopting military technology.

Second, the government financed roads only in a few special cases: military roads in Scotland from 1726, Highland roads from 1803, London-Holyhead from 1815, part of Carlisle-Glasgow in 1816, Edinburgh-Morpeth from 1822, and certain improvements in London. Most of the supposedly government-built highway from London to Edinburgh never existed, so there was no government-funded “interkingdom highway system” radiating from London. The turnpikes were not superseded. Even on Guldi’s estimate, “parliamentary roads” never formed more than two percent of the road network in length (81). The...