Automotive Empire - by Andrew Denning (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2025 Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot Award

In Automotive Empire, Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport--they organized colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole.

European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge--the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power.

As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.

Review Quotes

Denning's Automotive Empire is a welcome contribution to the literature on European colonialism in Africa.

Andrew Denning's Automotive Empire is a rich and significant contribution to the comparative history of how colonial regimes conceived and implemented their policies on road construction in Africa... Denning compellingly examines the intersection between colonial ambitions and the practical realities of roadbuilding, offering valuable insights into the technopolitical dimensions of European imperialism.

In focusing here on imperial logics of investment in motor transport infrastructure, Denning simultaneously helps nuance our understanding of global automobility from a European perspective and provides important context for thinking about the ways in which empire helped shape the conditions of possibility for African automobility.

About the Author

Andrew Denning is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Kansas. He is author of Skiing into Modernity and coeditor of The Interwar World. His work has also appeared in The Journal of Modern History, American Historical Review, Technology and Culture, and Environmental History.