About Me

I am a historian of modern Britain and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.  Born in Dallas, Texas, I received my AB from Harvard University, and then studied at Trinity College Cambridge before completing my PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley.  I have taught history at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Chicago, where I taught courses on the history of land use and how digital methods are changing humanities research. 

My first book, Roads to Power (Harvard University Press, 2011), tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure and technology caused strangers to stop speaking on the public street.

"If anyone doubts the power of infrastructure investment to change the course of a nation, they have only to read Roads to Power. Required for those who aim to shape the 21st century."

-- Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media

"In its masterful integration of technological and political history, this book provides an original, lucid, and exceptionally well-written study of an important episode in the modern co-evolution of transportation infrastructure and government power."

--Rosalind Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Roads were the produce of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control by bureaucrats over decisions relating to everyday life. Civil engineers, the first bureaucrats organized across every corner of the nation, applied maps, diagrams, and trignometry to the task of swaying government to the cause of building bridges of enormous expense in the farthest borders of the nation. The power associated with these projects were immense, sufficient to make empires out of backwaters. Libertarians and radicals grew wary of the increased power given to engineers, the sums of money and clandestine decisions shielded from the traditional democratic processes of local government. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries. 

Does information really work to unite strangers rather than divide them? Do markets work to unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. It draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the Digital Divide, and Net Neutrality. Roads to Power is required reading for students of development, technology, participatory government, and the internet.

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