Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis - (Early American Studies) by Alec Zuercher Reichardt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Infrastructure was key to British victory in the Seven Years' War yet was its undoing on the roads to revolution

Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis maps the Seven Years' War for the American Interior and reconstructs the inter-imperial roots of the American Revolution. Centering on the eighteenth-century geopolitical struggle for the greater Ohio Valley, Alec Zuercher Reichardt reframes a familiar story by uncovering the larger imperial competition to gain, control, and exploit communication networks across North America and the Atlantic. Through a comparative perspective, Reichardt traces British infrastructural development alongside the efforts of other major powers in North America, including the French Empire, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Cherokee Nation, and other Indigenous polities.

By the height of the Seven Years' War, this contest for the American Interior had propelled the British to construct imperial communications infrastructure that outpaced and overwhelmed the efforts of France, its primary European rival, and that co-opted key Native information and transportation channels. British success in wartime was borne not just of a newly enlarged and centralized infrastructure state, but also of that expanded state's ability to exploit extra-governmental circuits, notably metropolitan and colonial newspapers and Indigenous ally networks.

The rise of the British North American infrastructure state, however, was also the empire's undoing. The same roads, printing presses, and postal networks constructed and funded by the War Office and imperial treasury also became the primary routes of incendiary print, popular mobilization, and propaganda. In the wake of the Seven Years' War, the ligaments of the British empire inadvertently provided the material channels for those who sought to oppose the British state. The roads that led to British imperial power, then, became routes to imperial crisis.

Review Quotes

"Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis offers an imaginative and original way of thinking about what Lawrence Henry Gipson called 'the great war for empire.' The book's major contribution is to bring a structural dimension to the history of the integration of the Atlantic world. It calls attention to the infrastructures that made Atlantic integration possible, especially the roads--on land as well as water-based--and the political and military struggles that accompanied the creation of that infrastructure. The treatment of the relationship between European and Indigenous infrastructure is especially fascinating and revealing. A superb book."-- "Eliga H. Gould, author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire"

"In Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis, Alec Zuercher Reichardt reconstructs an empire that did not emerge just from the heads of statesmen but was also hammered out in the tough terrain of the interior. This masterful study takes the reader from Whitehall in London to Native American settlements to offer a compelling and original interpretation of the rise and fall of British Empire in North America."-- "Patrick Griffin, author of The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World"

About the Author

Alec Zuercher Reichardt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri.