British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 by Casper Andersen (review)

In 1910, at the prestigious address of 1 Great George Street, Westminster, the Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) built a luxurious new headquarters and fitted it out with great columns, extravagant chandeliers, broad mahogany staircases, and stately halls and meeting rooms. The façade was ornamented with floral symbols of Britain and the Empire: “the Tudor rose, thistle and daffodil representing Britain (including Ireland); the maple leaf for Canada; for New Zealand the silver fern; a protea species for South Africa; the golden wattle for Australia; a palm leaf for all the Crown Colonies; and lotus flowers to represent India” (46). Material for the building included timber and other products from various parts of the Empire, symbolizing, as was explained in the pages of the trade journal African Engineering, “the close relationship of those who constitute the Institution of Civil Engineers in all parts of the world” (qtd. in Andersen 46). The international and colonial contingent of ICE membership had indeed grown steadily since its founding in 1871, and by 1912 twenty-two percent of the ICE members resided in the colonies, 376 of them (five percent) in Africa. Through active correspondence and publishing, and the organization of international conferences and committees, the ICE did manage to sustain and grow a professional network throughout the Empire, even while other factors—the grand new headquarters, for one—ensured that the center of power for the profession remained firmly in London. At the helm of the profession was the so-called Great George Street Clique: the consulting engineers to whom Government would turn when seeking expertise for, say, a rail line into Rhodesia, or a dam across the Nile. To this professional elite in London, Africa represented many things: a rhetorical space to display engineering-as-civilization, a testing ground for young recruits, a stage for the self-styled explorer engineer, and most of all a vast new market for lucrative contracts.

Casper Andersen covers these themes and much more in this important study of the ways in which the civil engineering profession in London shaped and was shaped by Britain’s colonial entanglement with Africa. The book’s title, British Engineers and Africa, suggests a broad scope, and some readers might be disappointed to find that in fact Andersen has limited himself, firstly, to the engineering community in London—the subject is not engineers in Africa but engineers and Africa—and secondly to a subset of that category, the domain of the civil engineer. Most of the book relates through different channels back to the ICE, which emerges as the center of gravity of this study. As Andersen ably demonstrates, this aspect of engineering history is worthy of such close study.

Andersen’s choice of subject is especially valuable in that it brings into focus the interpersonal and fine-fibered, but still very consequential, relationships between private engineering firms and various imperial offices of government. Given that much of the historiography of technology and imperialism has focused on the military’s engineering branches such as the Royal Engineers, the Royal Artillery, and the Ordnance Survey, Andersen’s story of the civil engineering firms and empire is particularly welcome.

Throughout the book, Andersen employs a wide range of analytical approaches, drawing on the work of, among others, Christine MacLeod, Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, Felix Driver, John Darwin, Simon J. Potter, and Andrew S. Thompson. It is Thompson whom Andersen follows most closely, by “exploring the ways in which empire ‘struck back’ at the engineering profession, while knowing that it was more likely to do so in complex, unequal ways” (3). Andersen’s methodological approach is almost prosopographical; considerable effort has gone into analyzing the civil engineering community around Great George Street as well as the membership of the ICE, producing several impressive tables breaking down various features of these groups. In terms of sources, the work draws heavily from popular trade journals such as Engineer, Feilden’s Magazine, African Engineering, and...