Local,global and fragmented narratives about road construction: An invitation to look beyond our disciplinary space

Introduction

In this paper, we argue, through an examination of literature on roads, that we are far from a global narrative: our stories are geographically fragmented but, most importantly, intellectually disjoined. Despite its intention, social studies of technology keep apart objects (both natural and technological) and societies, maintaining a barrier between disjunctive narratives and, therefore, solidifying a neat separation between intellectual traditions. Furthermore, even the social dimension analysis is very fragmented in terms of discourses, institutions, practices and, hence, worldviews.

Interestingly, roads on their own have seldom been a subject matter in the works about the “Global North” as well as on the “Global South”. ¹ It does not mean that the literature on roads infrastructure is small. In fact, it is huge and here in our review, we have to be very selective in terms of geographical regions and disciplines. Thus, we are not aiming at presenting a comprehensive state of the art, but rather a review work that help to illustrate our point. Surely, we have overlooked studies the readers may consider relevant for the discussion. ² Nonetheless, we believe that those works here missing do not change our general argument on the fragmented nature of the literature concerned with infrastructure. Perhaps one merit of this paper is bringing to the discussion cases beyond Europe and the United States. In short, we bring cases that illustrate the kind of theoretical, methodological and empirical questions shared by the road’s studies in – and about – the “South” and the “North”. We want to overcome the complaint against North-centrism, fostering a fruitful dialogue between works from different traditions and similar challenges.

A common problem, for instance, is that we are still concerned with innovation and inventors, just like the “old” history of science was fascinated with discoveries and geniuses. Although the literature still focuses on new technologies, the calls for more studies on old ones have been with us for a long time: David Edgerton’s book is perhaps the most influential work in the field, but nearly ten years earlier Svante Lindqvist insisted that we need to investigate the “old” has become invisible. ³ A case in point is the construction of roads, which has been largely ignored by social histories of technology. Furthermore, despite the importance of roads both in shaping identities and subjectivities, as well as in economic, social and cultural development, it has not been a central subject of study even in the historiography of technology.

Indeed, the lack of a social history of the construction of roads is disconcerting, which addresses the problem of the negotiations between the diverse relevant actors around various technical alternatives. A first supposition that explains this absence could be the image of infrastructure as a rigid, invariable and impenetrable entity. However, there is a deeper reason related to what Susan Star characterised as “transparency”: “Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks”. ⁴

This apparent immanence has turned infrastructure into the landscape of our technological world, that is, its stage. Roads, trails and highways, as the invisible support of the socio-technical apparatus, lack the status of an object of study in itself, or at least it has been rarely studied as such. It has been a victim of the emphasis on innovation in historiography. ⁵ There is an intellectual tradition that deals with construction processes, but it is relatively marginal from social, political, cultural and even economic analysis. On the one hand, engineers, architects, designers, scientists and other professionals continue producing technical works, perhaps less enthusiastic to the co-production interpretation of artefacts, nature and society. ⁶ On the other hand, sociologists, historians, anthropologists and other social scientists overview literature under the assumption that their human actors are incapable of analysing the complexity of non-human actors they deal with. ⁷

Perhaps the shift towards consumption studies has led us to lose interest in production techniques, their development and the policies that have guided them. ⁸ It is time to take up the line of studies on the modes of production and, certainly, infrastructure is a boundary object ⁹ between production, consumption, and the construction of national and regional spaces (physical and symbolic). Most scholars acknowledge this feature but continue living and producing in the comfort-zone of their own disciplinary practices. We argue that we still need to explicitly recognise that, in order to exploit the multidimensional nature of infrastructure, we should draw lessons from disciplines concerned with infrastructure and build bridges between them. Economic history, geography, environmental studies, international relations, political history and anthropology tell us parts of the story on infrastructure, but the big picture looks is a distorted landscape; indeed we depict the world as a segregated myriad of natural objects, artefacts, societies and cultures in a way the modern paradigm taught us to do.

This article presents an overview of selected works on roads, bringing examples from studies concerned with different geographical and disciplinary perspectives, paying special attention to studies about roads in the “South”. We want to pinpoint where we are, what problems and, more importantly, what gaps can be identified. Of course, we cannot cover the whole spectrum, but we try to select what we consider to be the most relevant problems in the construction and use of road infrastructure aiming at identifying the constitutive questions of each of these perspectives.

We think of infrastructure as an “agent” as it exemplifies actors capable of changing the meanings, practices, attitudes and interests of social groups. ¹⁰ From this conceptual pivot, we could classify the literature into different groups, each speaking from one disciplinary matrix.

It is worth noting that these groups do not usually intersect. Each discipline has chosen one or, at most, two dimensions in order to examine the phenomenon, giving up the possibility of a holistic view. Particular neglect, as we will see, is found in the socio-technical processes of the construction of this (and other) type(s) of infrastructure. This concern has been around the studies on mobility and transport, particularly in recent years. The International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility ¹¹ was set up to contribute to the construction of a field that would close the disciplinary gaps in which these studies are trapped. In fact, the Association is a meeting place for heterogeneous actors (academics, professionals and citizens) and its dissemination bodies are forums for debate from different disciplinary, theoretical and geographical perspectives. However, the recent controversy between Mom and Merriman (2015) regarding a crisis in transportation studies shows that the field is being shaken by the need to promote a multidimensional approach, with a focus on transdisciplinary and transnationality, as well as working in multimodal studies. Our article wants to contribute to this debate. ¹²

Economic history and technology

In the case of technologies such as the Bakelite, the razor or the bicycle, it has been shown in detail the way in which social groups, with their interests, priorities and technical knowledge, modified the technical characteristics of the configuration of these devices during their construction and design stage. ¹³ However, for the case of roads, it is rare to find an analysis. One notable exception has been Langdon Winner’s classic work, ¹⁴ thoroughly challenged by Joerges. ¹⁵ Winner suggests that a political decision leaves its mark on the technical configuration of the artefact. The difficulty is to find bridges between these histories and the studies of linkages proper to economic historiography.

Regarding infrastructure in the South, Pedersen suggests that the lack of analytical interest is the result of a theoretical shift of focus in international development studies, which occurred in the 1970s:

While most of the research on regional development during the 1950s and 1960s was based on the point of view of public policy for regional and national development (e.g. Myrdal, Friedmann) the research focus shifted during the 1970s to strategies of enterprise owners and managers for the development of large private and most often multi-national enterprises. ¹⁶

In a paper on Zimbabwe, Pedersen ¹⁷ studies the conditions under which a complex transport system is modified by economic and political changes. It treats the subject of transport as an economic activity in which merchandise (cargo) is exclusively mobilised. On the one hand, economic restructuring and agrarian reforms brought about devastating effects aggravated by droughts. On the other hand, political instability caused by large pension payments made to veterans of the Zaire-Congo war, coupled with corruption, altered the dynamics of the transport system. As a result, it became necessary to increase imports from South Africa, raising the demand for more sophisticated and cheaper transportation routes, which favoured full logistic operations. The consequences were that the capital, Harare, lost the leadership in southern African trade, yielding it to Johannesburg, which was much better prepared.

Thus, business geography has made economic historiography forget the cases of unsuccessful insertion in global capitalism, or declining processes, such as the case of Zimbabwe and many other non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

The relationship between geography, the construction of the state and infrastructure has been a relentless subject of interest. This analytical slant, which gives explanatory power to geography, has a long tradition and remains dominant in social, political and economic historiographies, particularly in countries with abrupt topographies. For instance, Palacios and Safford ¹⁸ argue that the fragmentation of Colombian territory had a determinant in the construction of the nation. Despite its crucial role, the physical disconnection – due to its geography – is taken for granted and not critically analysed. In the same vein, Frank Safford’s work on the rise of a technical elite in nineteenth-century Colombia asks whether we should look for “external” causes to explain the failure of technological projects. ¹⁹ He answers in the positive; rather than the social and cultural constrains, the cause lies in structural, institutional and material conditions; specifically, he identifies as crucial the lack of an industrial production system and geographical constraints. Only at the end of the century, with the expansion of coffee exportations, he argues, the economy started demanding a technical knowledge. The “One Thousand-Days War” (1899–1903) prevented accomplishment of those projects.

An additional case of the historiography that the economic, political and administrative aspects that defined a disarticulated system of transport in Colombia is offered by Donald Barnhart. Barnhart’s doctoral work, ²⁰ which has become an important reference on the subject, mentions two important moments in the definition of transport policy in Colombia. The first was the “dance of the millions” of the United States “compensation” for the loss of Panama (nearly 100 million pesos). ²¹ He sees two periods in the story. The first one, the 1920s, had as its main characteristics improvisation, dispersion and discontinuity. According to Barnhart, many works began that did not contain a specific integration plan, until the resources were exhausted and the fiscal gaps became visible. As a result, subsidies for the contracts were approved, generating surcharges for the state.

A second moment is the “reform era”, which occurs as a consequence of the change in the type of government, going from a conservative party hegemony to a liberal political ideology. There was a rethinking in the policy of transport infrastructure plans supported by the Government of President Enrique Olaya Herrera. Fundamentally, according to Barnhart, the contribution of the liberal perspective was based on the state’s decision to support the construction of infrastructure with a substantial basis on the evidence of technical and economic studies on the appropriateness of the projects. Barnhart’s thesis cannot be understood as an absence of engineering, but of public works policies with a solid technocratic basis. Indeed, Jorge Arias de Greiff, in a sound work, shows how local innovations to overcome geographical challenges in Colombia can be traced back into the nineteenth century. ²²

Safford’s and Barnhard’s conclusion resonates a classic work on the construction of roads in the French Massif Central. ²³ James Bird also shows little interest in the way that roads were built and the role of local knowledge. He examines the common patterns in the construction of railroads and roads in the region, relating them to geographic factors such as the position of the Massif, its complicated topography and its relation with local economies, so as to conclude that the physical configuration of any route depends to a greater or lesser degree on the vehicle that uses it, but also on institutional initiatives. For Bird, the territory itself imposed very expensive conditions and, hence, the geography became a very powerful actor of this story. In contrast to Arias de Greiff, these authors ignore technological adaptation processes. “External” factors contribute to the formation of a certain space and to the configuration of the infrastructure of routes and transport links. By external influences, the authors refer mainly to economic interests and issues of security or defence of the territory, but also to the physical characteristics of the geography. Alas, these works are utterly oblivious to technological knowledge.

Interestingly, the case of the Massif is one of the “failure of modernity”, which makes it valuable for studies on the Global South, where discourses on “unfinished modernity” still circulate widely. Unfortunately, Safford and Bird fall short in showing the agency of local communities in the decisions to adopt one system or another. They do not even contemplate the possibility that the use of the mule was the most rational solution from the local economic and cultural perspectives; as if the adoption of the wheel was always the best alternative, without problematising the many meanings and versions of modernity, particularly in poor or peripheral regions.

Gwyn Campbell’s work on the Merino Empire in Madagascar in the nineteenth century is an interesting case that illustrates how the political configuration of a territory shapes the transport structure, and consequently the results of this configuration are manifested in the country’s economy. ²⁴ The two biggest obstacles to the development of Madagascar, he argues, were the lack of transportation infrastructure and the shortage of labour. Both conditions were imbricated because the transport of cargo and humans depended exclusively on “human traction”. Besides, it was intended to avoid the easy access of any foreign invading force. Although the economy in Madagascar was based on cheap labour and slavery (fanompoana), this social structure favoured small trails. Although the Merino Empire (1810–95) attempted to integrate the island to the international market, the effect on the change of infrastructure was dominated by socio-economic rationality and remained unchanged: the dependence on human traction intensified due to imperial structure and its dependence on the slave system, which made freight costs low enough not to justify changes. When the French invaded in 1895, the colonial policy instituted a modern network of railways and roads. Thus, Campbell opens the analysis of the variables of the social structure as an explanatory argument for the emergence and stabilisation of infrastructural options, avoiding geographical determinism.

The British case illustrates the role of the state rationale and practices. A good part of the historiography of the roads of that country follows the argument of the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb The Story of the King’s Highway. ²⁵ These stories emphasise the role of private individuals, businessmen, the militaries and investors. This approach has two possible, apparently contradictory, but complementary ideologies. On the one hand, the preponderance of the individuals who “lead” the projects and therefore become part of the symbology of national identities. On the other hand, although this national identity is exploited and diffused by the state, it is argued that capitalist development has arisen despite the “inefficiency of the state”, which in turn gave way to private initiative.

The Canal du Midi, in France, during the reign of Louis XIV provides another example worth commenting on the creation of national symbols around roads building. Chandra Mukerji ²⁶ convincingly argues that the figure of Pierre-Paul Riquet, as the archetype of the French ingenuity of the eighteenth century, is a construction that the state carried out a posteriori in order to be able to turn that work into a symbol of the monarchy. Riquet was not a great architect, and his engineering skills were virtually non-existent. His intention was to increase his fortune and that is why he embarked on this monumental work of 240 km that linked the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. It was not a state initiative, but rather a private one. However, the project required the participation of the state for its realisation. The reign of Louis XIV had used the image of France as a “New Rome”. What’s better than engineering as an instrument? This was how the state entered into Riquet’s business. In spite of the multiple conflicts, in the end a hero was needed who represented the genius of the empire. Thus, the figure of Riquet was built. But if Riquet had no engineering skills, how was the Canal possible? Mukerji carries out a meticulous work to recover a central element in the history of the technology, ²⁷ returning to Edward Hutchins’ theory of “distributed cognition”. ²⁸ Thus, she shows that, in effect, knowledge is not individual, but instead the fruit of collaborative social actions. ²⁹ The building techniques that were used were essentially Roman; local artisans maintained such knowledge, for example, for household water management. Moreover, those who held this knowledge were peasant women, who maintained the knowledge of Roman baths and then applied it to domestic hydraulic projects. This fantastic story shows us that local agents do not only play a central role as workforce, but they are also a source of knowledge and, therefore, the global history of technology requires local histories: political and economic history cannot be understood without social history of science and technology. We need more of these stories where women, workers, prisoners, peasants and even children appear as agents of production and use of knowledge, not only because of a matter of justice, but because without these actors, the history of technology will be at the service of ideological prejudices that complicate its true social appropriation. We shall return to this issue later.

The problem of the weakness of the state, many argue, was what led the British road system to rely on private tolls or turnpikes. But this story begins earlier, when the role of the state was crucial. Guldi’s study shows that just 40 years before the construction of the Bridgewater Canal, which cemented the supposed founding role of private capital and vision, road construction technologies had been introduced from continental Europe by the military for defence and occupation purposes, particularly of Scotland. That is to say, it was a determined action of the state, with tax resources, that drove the sector through military engineering and, later, thanks to the veterans who continued building for the local governments. ³⁰ What is usually forgotten is that construction of infrastructure is accompanied by a complex and powerful bureaucracy that managed to raise funds for the construction of a system of “interkingdom highways” that far surpassed the famous private toll roads. Guldi does not avoid this problem. ³¹

This is a well-known fact in the historiography of technology; Massimo Moraglio’s study of the Autostrada Milano-Laghi (1922), which was the first modern highway in the world, was the result of the collusion of the fascist government and the entrepreneur Piero Puricelli. As Moraglio points out, businessmen interests and political propaganda intertwined. But the Italian state was poor, and the 1929 crisis made the project economically unviable. Yet, the Italian model was widely admired and followed, particularly by the Nazis and their Reichsautobahnen system. ³²

In short, we should be aware that: (a) a study on infrastructure must cover the state, its policies, practices and bureaucracy; (b) studies on technology (and science) in general and those on road infrastructure, in particular, require that the business history be taken seriously. Finally, (c) if we want to understand how society has established itself in relation to technoscience, the military should be carefully studied. ³³

Roads and the environment

There is no doubt that building a highway involves an engineering challenge that requires expertise and specialised technical knowledge of geography, machinery, raw materials, methods and measurement instruments. But building a highway also requires spatial planning, econometric analysis on the impact on production, an ecological study of the effects of neighbouring niches and the effect on native communities that do not share “the development” paradigm. In short, beyond the work of engineers and technicians, the construction of road infrastructure and terrestrial routes impacts and visibly changes the physical and social life around them. The ecological question arises from the outset of the projects and, therefore, literature closely related (implicitly or explicitly) to environmental history is the closest we can get to the problem of design, planning and construction.

Traditionally, road infrastructure planning focuses only on the narrow road construction area and its immediate surroundings, which negates the ecological responsibility for a wider environment around the built road. Marchand’s study for Venezuela between 1936 and 1961 is an effort to provide better analysis tools for both geographers and national road infrastructure designers in spatial planning, which continues to be a source of controversy and social, economic and legal dispute. ³⁴

In view of this problem, Forman and Deblinger developed the category of “road-effect zone” for the case of a section of suburban highway west of Boston MS. ³⁵ The road-effect zone is the area over which it is possible to measure significant ecological effects caused by a highway, estimated to be 100 m perpendicular to the road, but variable according to ecological factors. For this, the authors analyse the effects of the road on plants, water and the life of wild animals. It is concluded from this experiment that, in effect, the road seriously affects many kilometres around it, for example reducing the habitat of diverse species. It is a study that calls for the inclusion of this type of analysis so as to know the impact of a highway or road on the natural environment. From the historiographical point of view, we must ask ourselves whether these variables have been taken into consideration either tacitly or explicitly, and in what way this has been invoked in local controversies.

An interesting example that sketches the panorama of the controversies and negotiations that arise when building a road in the middle of a protected natural environment is the study by Jeffrey Hackel. He examines the construction of a major highway within the Hlane Nature Reserve in Swaziland. ³⁶ It should be kept in mind that Integrated Conservation and Development has been an environmental policy implemented in the countries of southern Africa since the 1970s. The goal is to protect wildlife, restricting all access by humans, which is problematic since that includes the natives, who are effectively displaced from their ancestral lands. For many critics of this policy, it has resulted in the degradation and loss of wildlife and a reduction in biodiversity because it leads to an imbalance of the ecosystem since the natives are a relevant element in the protection of all species. The road was the main artery of the territory and its improvement sought to increase traffic for the sake of an economic incentive.

Hackel presents the debate that took place between conservationists, consultants, leaders, King Sobhuza II and business people, around the decision to build the road in the section that traversed the reserve. The conservationists proposed an alternative route that bordered the reserve, but its cost was considerably higher than the repair of the existing road. Finally, the road was made in the middle of the reserve, giving priority to private and governmental economic interests. ³⁷ Maintenance became the central object of dispute and resolution. The case illustrates the decision-making process in the construction of infrastructure when “development” and the conservation of a natural environment are in opposition.

We believe that these examples illustrate the kind of environmental questions and problems posed by roads building. Environmental history has tried to show over decades that it is neither possible nor desirable to make sharp separations between natural, social and technological factors because in practice what infrastructure builders face are complex combinations of all these elements, marinated in disputes of political origin. The achievements of engineering are not the exclusive result of the triumph of ingenuity over nature, nor are “natural” disasters due to the spirit of an ecological system separated from our infrastructures and actions.

Technical historiography and history of technology

Despite innovation studies still representing the mainstream literature in social studies of technology, there are remarkable exceptions that have kept a tradition of studying the construction, production and maintenance of technologies in use. Yet, such a tradition is still relatively marginal in most historiography of technology, alas. Besides, this literature is rather heterogeneous at the moment of analysing the practices of construction.

Such a special interest in new and high-technology may derive from the widespread idea (especially among social scientists) that technology is what comes out of a laboratory or results from an industrial process. As Edgerton has pointed out, that excludes most of the technology in use, both new and old, including roads. Against this prejudice, several historians of technology have studied infrastructure as a particular case of a socio-technical system (Thomas Hughes to Wieber Bijker, Lewis Mumford, David Edgerton, David Nye, just to mention but a few) making important contributions to social, political and economic historiography.

This tradition is not new. Pioneering works in the historiography of technology discussed the role of transport in the construction of “civilisation”, against which social constructivists of technology reacted. They were charged for being either too “internalist” or too “externalist”. Lewis Mumford’s work on technics, ³⁸ Joseph Needham’s study on Chinese science and technology, and especially the A History of Technology edited by C. Singer et al., opened the road to global histories, looking to cases beyond the North Atlantic world. ³⁹ Surprisingly, although transport recognised these authors as central in the establishment of all civilisations, all of them seemed more interested in the invention and construction of vehicles (from animal and human traction to combustion and electric) than in the building of roads. Even airports are barely discussed (e.g. Singer et al., Vol. V, Part V) and railways are mainly the invention and innovations of locomotives. ⁴⁰

The history of roads construction is a good case of old technology and materials that, after being forgotten, were reintroduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Asphalt had been used in roads construction thousands of years by Babylonians, Greeks and, of course, Romans, long before they were re-discovered in France and the United States, ⁴¹ and produced at an industrial scale to build highways and urban streets for the new motor cars. Machines such as the backhoe and the cement mixers, combined with new techniques of hydration in order to solidify and harden concrete, changed civil engineering, planning and work regimes (there is not a more eloquent image of the concept of solidifying society). Research and development in soil mechanics, emulsions, construction and maintenance equipment, and security protocols continued growing throughout the twentieth century, especially in Germany, Italy and the United States. ⁴² Yet, other infrastructures deserved more attention, presumably due to the spectacular innovations carried out by civil and electrical engineering and the use of new materials, especially steel produced thanks to a new industrial method – the Bessemer Converter. The United States steel industry spread a new kind of building technology. Consequently, historians focused on the uses of this revolutionary way of production, incarnated in the steel baron, Andrew Carnegie. In contrast to the little attention paid to roads, professional historians and engineers wrote celebratory epic stories of the great advances in the building of bridges and tunnels due to the invention of structural steel and heroic entrepreneurs. ⁴³ The fifth volume of A History of Technology, which covers the 1850–1900 period, is completely oblivious to the roads building. H.S. Smith, Director of the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company, wrote a technical chapter (in form and content) on how the new materials technologies (concrete and steel, mainly), designs (e.g. suspending-chains) and construction machines (like the rock-drilling used in tunnels used in the dry) produced a new generation of bridges and tunnels. ⁴⁴

Some of those works provide precious technical information, including interpretations of how the ecology, geography and social conditions influenced technological choices. They are a first-order approach analysis of the processes of construction. How negotiations unfolded during the planning and construction stages required to investigate micro-histories and analyse case studies in detail. That became one of the main problems of the sociology and history of technology since the 1980s. Some engineers and scientists, turned into sociologists and historians of science, pioneered what became known as the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) school.

Wiebe Bijker, ⁴⁵ Thomas Hughes, ⁴⁶ Walter Vincenti ⁴⁷ – every one of them, from their own experiences as engineers – contributed decisively in a new way of understanding the technological practice. However, technical knowledge about old infrastructures, such as roads, is seldom present for contemporary social knowledge of technology literature. Indeed, most of the literature continued focused in the early stages of new technologies. Hughes, for instance, showed that electric power systems took different forms depending on the social and political organisations in which they developed. In other words, the international diffusion process of technical knowledge and practice is flexible in its implementation, long after being invented and by unpredictable actors.

Through a close look to large-scale regions, i.e. national states, Hughes coined the term “technological styles” to describe the relationship between the physical configuration of large technological systems and the political regimes that controlled the territory. ⁴⁸ For the history of other infrastructures, such as transportation, this hypothesis would be worth exploring. We should ask whether substantial variations in technology transfer occur in smaller scales, as Andy Warwick ⁴⁹ and David Kaiser ⁵⁰ showed in the case of physics.

Interestingly, scholars from different intellectual traditions – often strangers to the SCOT movement and interested in infrastructures in the Global South – have been striving to understand construction processes of old technologies in new spaces opening promising problems, questions and proposals.

The construction of the Viña del Mar-Concón roadway (1917–30) introduced reinforced concrete through technical exchange under the Pan-American umbrella. The case was studied by Chilean of urban historian, Rodrigo Booth. ⁵¹ In his work, concrete was a crucial actant that helped catalysing a (global as well as sub-continental) North–South technological dialogue, aimed at building a large transportation infrastructure. The road was one of the most advanced projects in the continent, becoming a symbol of the modernisation of Chile. The regime of Chilean dictator Carlos Ibañez (1927–31) grew hand-in-hand with the engineers’ prestige. Both became the symbols of leadership and professionalism, respectively. The new aesthetics carried by the construction of a touristic landscape remind another contemporary project on the other side of the Atlantic, sponsored by another dictator obsessed by building new “scenic infrastructures”, such as the autostrada Milano-Laghi. ⁵² Two sides of simultaneous – but not identical – infrastructure solutions, a reminder that Europe was not the only centre of technology.

Lidiany Silva analysed how auditing practices on roads works in the providence of Minas Gerais intertwined with the legislation and the institutional arrangements to define the convenience of building of a road in that region. This entailed, Silva argues, engineers had different hats: state technocrats; experts in road construction, maintenance and uses; designers; legislative advisers; and auditors. ⁵³ Her crossed-reading of technical, legal and political documents provides good evidence to explain the co-production process.

Guldi’s work on British roads resonates with Silva’s, although the former is interested in a period and a place where modern roads were in the phase of “re-invention”. Guldi shows that English roads were invented along the political instruments to administrate cultural and economic resources. More importantly, both works argue that new techniques arouse out of old technologies. Thus, innovation was a gradual process as a result of situating infrastructure in a specific social, cultural and environmental space.

Engineers, scientists, architects and civil servants, as well as professionals and workers turned into historians have a lot to teach professional scholars that see themselves as the true social historians of technology. We should learn to work with them and deal with their intellectual contributions without assuming our epistemological superiority. The construction and maintenance of roads is at the heart of the material culture history of technology, so we call bringing materiality back in our analyses. We have not to fear that we will lose the lessons learned after all these years trying to stop being modern in our narratives on the co-production of objects, nature and society.

Technical literature on road building is huge. Mainstream social history of technology treats it with disdain. Perhaps we should read from a more modest perspective technical histories published in relatively old technical journals such as Cuadernos de Historia de Ingeniería, Transactions of the Newcomen Society or Le Macchine. Journals in our own field contain valuable works that mainstream social historiography of technology ignores or disregards.

Conclusions

The great divide between “internal” and “external” histories of technology persist. The emergence of new fields within the “social studies” created a myriad of smaller divides. This is clearly illustrated by the historiography of roads, the case we studied in this paper. We think, however, that by generalising majority of the historiography is focused on local cases seeking to understand how situated knowledge intertwines with national or even international political and economic projects. Interestingly, despite road networks trespassing national boundaries, the largest scales are national. Høgselius Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten’s work on how infrastructure was essential in the construction of Europe is exceptional. ⁵⁴ On the other hand, while we found very thoughtful studies on most Latin American countries, current historiography is oblivious to larger systems, such as the Pan American Highway. ⁵⁵ Thus, very little has been done at a regional scale, let alone at a global one.

From an intellectual viewpoint, there are certainly common questions and narratives that resonate with each other. For instance, the role ascribed to geography in topographic contexts as different as Colombia and France. Nonetheless, the studies of infrastructure show a disarticulation of the methodologies used to observe the construction and use of roads. The perspectives with which it is attempted to approach the problem end up privileging certain focuses of attention, such as roads as products of the innovation of technologies or techniques of production, deprived of the conditions of socialisation. In addition, infrastructure is seen as an indicator of development, a logical product of the modernising process of the contexts in which it is located and has not been considered as an object that needs a thorough revision to explain or understand the phenomena that are implicit in its appearance.

It is necessary to recognise that the inclusion of economic and political variables fuels the understanding of decision making in the production or rejection of an object, thus helping to understand successful and unsuccessful cases. The analyses on broader basis deficit are especially surprising in the science and technology studies literature.

Histories of infrastructure building are a fertile field for understanding the interaction of nodes and construction of objects and technologies in the social fabric. As several studies in the history of science and technology show, opening up historical narratives should include the ways in which new actors perform their practices, negotiate and are legitimate knowledge producers. Indeed, the inclusion of techniques of design shows how the forms assumed by the construction go through specific political and economic biases, and yet, they end up being applied in practice by people with traditional knowledge who translate the interests and turn them into material objects.

In this sense, the sociological and historical work is expanded by the possibilities of generating narratives linking economic models and political decisions with the practical work of the worker, who from tradition and experience translates the macrostructural statements into practical ways of making materiality possible.

Scrutinising the construction of infrastructures allows a better understanding of the formation of the global system of local practices from the use of knowledge transferred through technologies such as road construction. This is just the example we have discussed here, but it could be extended to a wide variety of contexts. In countries crossed by an inequitable resource distribution problem, we would like to have a historiography of technology that allows us to look at the environmental and land problem. That is an unexplored door to get access to the conflict that is derived from political violence. We may also like to learn about the digital divide as a consequence of the cables and waves needed in these countries to transmit information. ⁵⁶

If we see the disciplinary approaches as groups of topographers in the historiography space, we could see that each one of them has made cuts that sometimes reach across more than one plane, but in general, they do not exceed more than two dimensions. For example, in economic studies, culture is tacitly or explicitly recognised, but not explored operatively; similarly, in many of the cultural studies of things, technology seems to be costless. In extreme cases, material culture studies make materiality invisible, focusing on the cultural aspects. Infrastructure has a performative effect on the life and realities of the subjects that interact with it. But transport infrastructure also connects, separates, re-creates and displaces numerous intellectual and financial resources, especially at the construction stage.

Problems related to the construction of roads are particularly susceptible to the methodological limitations of disciplinary decisions hence, infrastructure analyses require a multidisciplinary approach in a transnational perspective, as Mom insists. ⁵⁷ Trying to fill the gap between a social historiography, which does not reduce it to “the social”, and a technical historiography, which does not reduce it to “the techno-scientific-natural”, would foster the emergence of a new set of questions and answers that is bigger and deeper than the simple sum of the history of technology and the political and socio-economic history. This implies getting closer relations between the history of artefacts, cultural history, environmental history, economic history, and the social studies of science and technology.

We are aware that our argument is far from original; we are stressing the importance of avoiding taking the construction of technology for granted. Otherwise, we will perpetuate the idea that planning, designing and construction are separate processes. The way infrastructure and society are co-produced is particularly sensitive to the decisions made from the conception of the project on paper through the transportation, assembly, maintenance and relocation of resources. Including or excluding local communities and other interest groups, at any of these phases, leaves a deep mark on the social, political and economic role of all infrastructures. This is particularly true during the early phases of the projects when the alternatives are still open – a feature that is not exclusive to new technologies. Time is the most powerful ally for the naturalisation of technological narratives and the reification of socio-technical objects.

Our proposal is methodological: we need to widen our view of the established knowledge about our subjects of study; usually colleagues from other disciplines have investigated some dimension of our problem. We are not advocating for a “convergent” or any sort of coherent narrative. Our point is far less ambitious and naive: we need the knowledge produced by other disciplines in order to either dispute their findings or identify resonances. Our sub-disciplines (“history of”/“sociology of …”) reduce even further the subject matter to our well known narrow categories. Of course, this is inevitable as a constitutive part of the simplification process of analysis, and the construction of epistemic communities, as the hard sciences have successfully demonstrated. However, social analyses are built upon multiple interpretations that compete, but also cooperate; we must take into account them, at least as part of our state of the art. We ask our students to do the same thing within our fields (a science, technology and society work without any reference to Latour is suspicious). We should do it too but moving beyond from the comfort-boundaries of our discipline and narrow sub-discipline. Perhaps the best strategy is working with colleagues from other traditions. In the case of infrastructure, we have a lot to learn from users as well as from builders (workers and engineers).

Thinking historically on roads would contribute to dismantle the “techno-tales” through the use of public history in the current political debates on alternative technological systems. ⁵⁸ Many of these stories are fuelled by the lack of attention given to the social studies of science and technology in the research on infrastructure, fuelling a naive view of technology. Conversely, technology studies must open to economic and more general historical analysis. We call for closing the gaps between intellectual traditions in order to build more realistic perspectives of the complex history of the construction and use of transport infrastructures, namely the very backbone of modernity.