Roads to Power

Jo Guldi. Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2012.

Guldi seeks to reclaim the lost role of the State in the history of the British road network prior to the 20th century. This is a history of the development of the “infrastructure state,” something she argues has not been fully recognized or appreciated. The predominant role that private enterprise played in the later nineteenth century has overshadowed an early period; a full century ending in the mid 1830's when the British state, through increasingly centralized means, created a substantial and robust national road network where none had previously existed. In order to convert a scattering of locally-funded turnpikes and a sparse network of military roads built to solidify British control of Scotland into a much more rationalized network serving civilian and economic needs, visionary “centralizers” found the tools—physical, fiscal, and rhetorical—to sway political opinion towards their expansionist, nationalizing ends.

In this light, Guldi finds that the real accomplishment of long-celebrated heroes of civil engineering wasn’t their technical innovations in road- and bridge-building, but their persuasive and managerial talents. Creating a national road network was less a triumph over the physical environment than over parochial interests and deeply-rooted notions of British liberty. The genius of MacAdam, then, wasn’t the technique of road paving named for him (and Guldi notes that he should be regarded as a popularizer, not innovator, of his namesake “macadamized” roads). Rather, MacAdam developed methods of enforcing standardization without reliance on on-site experts, while managing a large, unskilled workforce.

In the end, opponents to the newly created national road network won the political battle within a few short decades of the ‘centralizers’ victory; the localization movement succeeded politically but the cost to British roads and to poorer regions of Great Britain was high. In the early 20th century, the pendulum would swing back towards centralization—in Britain and elsewhere—and then libertarian opposition to the concept of the ‘public good’ would make yet another comeback at the end of the century—an era we are still living through. Lobbying efforts by telecommunications interests to essentially turn the internet into a “toll road” of sorts is part of that same backlash.

White Trash

Nancy Isenberg. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016.

Isenberg holds that Americans have long been in denial about the degree about class--it's role in American history, it's deep roots in early English colonization, and even the very fact of it's existence. This book serves, then, as an implicit critique of American exceptionalism. By the end, she wants the reader to be completely disabused of any lingering doubts that the United States has been, and remains, a society deeply stratified by class, and possessing a sizable white underclass that, to paraphrase Jesus of Nazareth, has always been with us.

She succeeds in that end, but because this is a story of the white underclass, her conceptual relationship with race is problematic. It's not entirely sure what Isenberg thinks of the relationship between race and class in American history. At times, she makes reference to the conventional assertion that appeals to racism have often divided the black and white underclass, but this conventionally leftist appeal to a class-based interpretation doesn't seem to be her primary focus.

Another problem is that African-Americans appear to be the only non-white minority given much attention in this book. We learn little if anything about Hispanic Americans, or the Asian-American experience in the West. Her story begins in the early English colonies, and never really makes it past the Mississippi. And most unfortunately, there are times when her writing seems to suggest an equivalency being made between white poverty and black slavery. Her view is very focused on the rural South and her book might actually be stronger had she made a less sweeping claim to writing "The" story of class in the United States.

Still this is an ambitious book, not afraid to throw a wide net and find connections between colonial land squatters and twenty-first century reality tv stars. It will be interesting to see what Isenberg has to say on race and class in the future.

The Rhetoric of Conservatism

Bruce D. Dickson. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1982.

The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 was the culmination of decades of reformist agitation against the 1776 Constitution. By 1829, the largely Eastern conservative elite recognized that further resistance would only stoke ever-more radical backlash, and the reformers of the West got their opportunity.

That convention would largely disappoint those reformers, as conservatives and their moderate allies were able to defeat all but the most modest of reforms, and prevent the adoption of universal white male suffrage or white population apportionment. The first three chapters of this book detail how that happened.

The final three chapters, on the other hand, analyze the particular qualities of Virginia conservatism at this period, and the origins and nature of conservative rhetoric and its underlying ideology. At the time, Virginia conservatism was deeply anti-democratic, but not yet fully defined by the "positive good" defense of slavery which was just beginning to take shape in the 1830's. Although often buttressed by references to classic conservative arguments by Edmund Burke and others, their conservatism was heavily grounded in concrete experience and a suspicion of abstraction and idealism. Government should be predicated on what had worked and what already existed rather than idealized notions of what might improve society. And liberal notions of individual liberation were a threat to social harmony and mutual interests.

Slavery would eventually take a more prominent role in this conception, by way of concerns for the sanctity of property as a basis for political stability. At the same time, the increased focus on slavery as the basis for Virginia society led to a more racially-defined conception of citizenship; so that in the 1850's Virginia conservatives would end up ratifying the same universal white male suffrage they had resisted so successfully two decades prior.