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  • Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State by Jo Guldi
  • Patrick Carroll (bio)
Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State. By Jo Guldi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. vi+297. $39.95.

As the title suggests, this book is about political power and the infrastructure of roads. It discusses England, Scotland, and Wales in detail, and makes occasional reference to Ireland. It covers the period from the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.

In recent years a new field has emerged under the label of "infrastructure studies." Its source is primarily communications and is focused on the internet. This book is important because it reminds us that infrastructure studies, if it is to go by this name, must broaden its definition of the field. Infrastructure studies should include sanitary, water, electrical, inland navigation, and other telecommunications infrastructure, and without doubt roads.

The book is exactingly researched and extremely well written. It documents [End Page 405] in detail the politics of road building and demonstrates the centrality of roads in the development of the modern state. The first of three parts documents the role of the military in building roads from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, including the techniques developed. Scotland is central to this story, as roads were basic to securing the conquest of that country by the English. The second part is the transition to what the author terms "parliamentary roads" around the turn of the nineteenth century. This is the central part of the book. It focuses on the rise of civil engineers and the political struggles that took place around road building. The third part is an account of travelers on the roads. It seems to have little connection to the story of state formation, and could even be a separate book. Though reference is made to the way the roads served the development of a sense of nation, and there is occasional mention of the traffic police, these are not developed in any substantial way. Instead it is a narrative of all the different travelers, their relations, and their problems.

The meat of this work concerns the rise (and fall) of road building by the central government. It is in this context that civil engineers take over road building from the military. None of them, including the most famous such as John Loudon McAdam and Thomas Telford, are granted much in the way of technical innovation. McAdam is presented as a failed businessman in banking and tar manufacture who merely reduced military techniques to a simple set of rules (it is ironic that he was involved in tar manufacture given that mixing of tar with small stones gave us "tarmacadam" at the turn of the twentieth century).

The key to the success of the civil engineers was rather their "techniques of persuasion," in particular the rigorous definition of general principles and the establishment of quantifiable project metrics. These techniques gave them power to overwhelm politicians who were skeptical of central government getting into the business of building roads. The book is thoroughly focused on the fights that surrounded road building, including those between civil engineers. In the latter case, however, the general principles were themselves fought over. The author argues that who prevailed depended not on science, but on politics. This opposition is pressed throughout, but I could not help thinking at times why they should be conceived as an either/or. Certainly those whose techniques were adopted would claim it was because they were based on science, even if they had to fight it out in the political realm.

The framing of the narrative of the rise of central government road building is the struggle between localism and centralization. Certainly such struggles were real enough, but the author gives a long detailed account of every claim and counterclaim, whether to do with turnpike trusts, corruption, weighing machines, the development of markets, improvement and civilization, the role of the military, relief of the poor, models of management, rights to freedom of movement, and on and on. All this is funneled [End Page 406] through the analytic of local vs. central government, even when that is...

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