On May 6, 1994, Queen Elizabeth II of England and President François Mitterrand of France ceremonially inaugurated the Channel Tunnel—a highly expensive assemblage of underground and underwater passages and steel railroad tracks that promised to afford a new and deeper level of connectivity between the island nation of Great Britain and the continent of Europe. Barely twenty years later, in a referendum held on June 23, 2016, a majority of British voters determined that at least some aspects of this greater connectivity were not so desirable, voting to withdraw from the European Union.
This ambitious and wide-ranging survey of the development and use of European infrastructures from c. 1850 to 2000 takes as a central concern the tensions between their perceived promise for increasing wealth and for enhancing peaceful interchange among peoples and nations and the more complex ways in which these technological systems have actually been deployed. Topics discussed...