The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today (review)

Ted Conover’s engagingly written The Routes of Man is part of a recent trend of road-trip narratives by journalists; the book is similar in tone and style, for example, to Rob Gifford’s China Road (2007) and Peter Hessler’s Country Driving (2010). Conover trades depth for breadth, however, offering an outsider’s perspective on a much wider swath of regions and cultures. The book has six main chapters; they are loosely connected, reflecting their origins as separate pieces. Each highlights a particular region and topic, from mahogany extraction in Peru to trucking and AIDS in east Africa to “car clubs” in China to the assorted hazards of roads and driving in Lagos, Nigeria. Between the main chapters are much shorter chapterlets exploring topics such as road ecology and cultural representations of roads.

The book’s strength—its broad scope—is also its weakness, however. Conover’s firsthand descriptions of his travels give life to the book, but The Routes of Man lacks more cohesive, penetrating analysis, such as direct comparisons between regions and topics or more explicit treatment of how the impact of roads today differs from times past. The book does offer some relevant theoretical snippets, from a discussion of E. O. Wilson’s “edge effect” to the importance of local knowledge and informal user networks, and there are interesting but somewhat arbitrary-seeming morsels of history (Inca roads, Napoleon’s road through the Alps, the evolution of Broadway, and so on). Scholars will wish for a more extensive historiography and bibliography. The book also bumps up against the question of what exactly constitutes a “road.” Rather than settling this question, Conover’s contribution is to highlight, perhaps inadvertently, the difficulty of answering it in a world where the difference between “roads” and “pathways” may be culturally specific, and frozen rivers (there is a chapter on the isolated Zanskar River valley of northern India) can function as roads. Conover’s more explicit attempts at defining what makes a road are neither very satisfying nor consistent; he writes that roads are “built with purely utilitarian intent, to help move people and things from one place to another” (p. 66), and that “a blocked road is a thwarted intention” (p. 217). Yet elsewhere he makes it clear that this utilitarian definition is too simple, as in a fascinating chapter showing that blocking roads has been an important part of military and political strategies in Israel’s West Bank. As a result, the book’s overall message—and the answer to the subtitle—is unclear. The hardcover dust jacket, which contains eye-catching photos of roads around the world, is perhaps indicative: there’s clearly something interesting here, but historians of technology will need to put the analytical pieces together themselves.

The Routes of Man functions best as a book about users, providing a mosaic view of how people in various parts of the world understand and are using roads today. In particular, Conover offers glimpses of how roads function as networks—commercial, personal, political and military, and symbolic. Yet he neglects to explain how roads differ from other elements in the wider networks that they are part of, such as rivers, container ships, communications networks, and the like. Nor does he separate the impact of roads from that of associated technologies such as trucks, logging technologies, railroads, or oil. The book does hint at the technical realities of roads, for example mentioning the challenges of building and maintaining roads in various landscapes, but it eschews a more technical history.

Conover is refreshingly evenhanded and realistic about the ways uses of roads are shaped by local cultures and circumstances. In Peru, for example, he explains that a thriving system of commercial drivers paying off police to look the other way at illegal passengers emerged because the underpaid police need money just as people need transport...