British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914 by Casper Andersen (review)

Casper Andersen's British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914 is a thought-provoking book about the relationship between engineering and empire. Unlike other works that deal with this topic, its focus is on imperial projects imagined, arranged, evaluated, and contested in Britain, not the colonies. Written in dialogue with the new imperial history, Andersen avoids the pitfalls of diffusionism and Eurocentrism by insisting that empire manifested itself at home. Rather than examining empire as a thing out there in the world, he is adamant about tracking dynamic networks, investigating layered interactions, and probing messy nodes in the metropolitan center. Consequently, he draws readers into the complex ways the domination of far-off others shaped lives and livelihoods in Britain.

Andersen deals with complicated themes, but his book is clearly written and nicely organized. The first chapter looks at the politics of professional journals, namely the circulation of imperial engineering dreams and the power of knowledge production. Chapter 2 offers a compelling spatial analysis of the London-based institutional sites where members of the engineering profession met. The third chapter grapples with specific engineering networks and their colonial interests, engagements, allies, and opponents, while the fourth provides a detailed analysis of the Institution of Civil Engineers and its explicit ties to the empire. The fifth chapter addresses the public life of the engineer, a figure whose cultural status ranged from gentleman to explorer. Chapter 6 concerns the modernizing efforts of and preservationist fears about dam building in the Nile Valley, a controversy that reveals the moral predicaments surrounding British engineering projects abroad.

Who were the engineers? There were two types in Victorian through Edwardian Britain: military and civil. Andersen is interested in the civil, a flexible term used to describe a wide range of scientifically minded experts who designed, planned, managed, and built. Within this broadly defined group, he is particularly interested in the pivotal efforts of a fascinating yet "contested and ambiguous" subset of practitioners known as consulting engineers (p. 5).Unlike most engineers, these specialists were "independent professionals," meaning that they did not work exclusively for private firms or the state (p. 6). Over time, as demand for their design expertise increased, consulting engineers grew in wealth, status, and power. Like the other engineers encountered in this book, they were highly influential men whose personal and professional identities were forged through and invested in the exploits of empire.

Race is notably absent in Andersen's thoughtful and thorough work about British men and Africa. With a works-cited section that includes pieces by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha and an analysis that seeks to show how ideas about and projects in the colonies shaped as they were transformed by metropolitan life, this omission is surprising. How did race bear down on engineering projects and vice versa? How did whiteness and the privileges it enabled affect the engineering men? To what extent did race define the urban, elite, and discursive spaces that molded the profession? For those of us who deal with chronologies and cultures popularized by period dramas like Downton Abbey, heeding the postcolonial call to deconstruct racialized practices in their historical context is paramount.

Given this gap, it is interesting that Andersen finds diaspora a productive way to think about British engineers in the world. Building on Robert Angus Buchanan's work, he deploys phrases such as "complex imperial diasporas" and "the diasporas of British engineers in Africa" to describe metropolitan men working in the territories (pp. 4, 9). On one hand, this is understandable. The word diaspora does connote the dispersal, spreading, or scattering of people and, as this book demonstrates, British engineers and their projects were strewn across Africa. On the other hand, as diaspora scholars have shown, diasporas are not usually voluntary: the people who tend to (be forced to) claim this subject position do so amid slavery, genocide, and other violence.

Observations about the politics of difference, mobility, and displacement aside, this important work will stimulate discussion about the...