Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis

Following the Seven Years' War, British authorities constructed military roads, absorbed Native American pathways, established postal routes, and solidified supply lines across the American interior. Using this increasingly complex web of communication and transportation they aimed to control the continent and strengthen imperial authority over the Indigenous peoples who had lived across the Ohio River Valley and Appalachian Mountains for millennia. Yet as tensions grew throughout the 1760s and ’70s, these arteries of empire paved the way for the whispers of rebellion across wide swaths of the North American colonies. This infrastructure served as a critical mechanism for the movement of people, things, and ideas to and from the backcountry. 

Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis offers a spatial history of the American Revolution, arguing that the physical infrastructure of the British Empire directly enabled its own downfall. Author Alec Zuercher Reichardt challenges traditional narratives that focus solely on ideological discourse in coastal cities, turning the reader’s attention instead to the muddy, hard-carved pathways, roads, and turnpikes of the American interior. With the physical means to transport news, ideas, and goods that turned beliefs into action, routes built to tether the colonies to London instead allowed a fragmented people to communicate and unite against the Crown. 

Excerpt

Communications critically shaped each stage of the war: its causes, its course, and its consequences. The American Interior was, at its heart, a space of connections, a region long valued for its paths and waterways that served as critical Indigenous communications channels. For European empires, the Interior held the same promise. By the mid-eighteenth century, the drive to gain control of the Ohio River spurred French militarization throughout the region, a development closely watched by increasingly fearful British governors and colonists. After the violent confrontation in Jumonville’s Glen, the rapid influx of American news and related propaganda at once redirected Anglo-French diplomatic negotiations and incited strong public support for imperial intervention to defend territorial rights in the American Interior. These prints also heightened diplomatic tensions, which were then heightened further as war-minded ministers and politicians wielded these and still more incendiary maps, pamphlets, and reports.  

If the war for the American Interior was sparked by communications, it was also fought via communications. The first front was tactical, while the second was symbolic—a contest for public support, international approval, and political mobilization. This contest of empires and communications set off a chain of technological, administrative, cultural, and infrastructural developments that, by war’s end, transformed the British Empire in North America, realigned Indigenous alliances, undermined New France, and re- shaped American geography. The British imperial infrastructure state this war produced soon stretched beyond the empire’s prewar limits, extending deeper into the Interior and into spaces previously (or concurrently) claimed by the French, Haudenosaunee, Cherokees, and other nations and peoples.  

The British Empire rapidly transformed the North American landscape during and in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, constructing an unprecedented web of roads and transport services that not only connected colonial frontiers to provincial centers, and provincial centers to London, but that together formed a new centralized imperial communications infrastructure. From the expansion of the colonial postal service, to the inauguration of the transatlantic packet boat, to the construction of new major military highways deep into the American Interior, the growth and remarkable improvement of British communications turned the tide of war. British advantage was borne not just of an enlarged and centralized state, but also of British imperial officials’ ability to exploit and encourage extra governmental information sources, most notably London and colonial newspapers and Native oral networks. However, victory over France did not resolve the larger contest for the Interior, nor did it guarantee continued British control over its claimed territories. Indigenous claims to the region remained, joined too by increasingly contentious claims and visions within the British Empire itself.  

Those same roads and postal networks constructed and funded by the War Office and imperial treasury—and which allowed the British military and other officials to convey official correspondence, intelligence, and bureaucratic paperwork to the empire’s communications hub in New York and then back to the metropole—quickly also became the primary routes of private colonial correspondence and propaganda. By the eve of the American Revolution, the same communications infrastructure that had forged the British imperial state in North America also enabled radical colonists who sought to dismantle that state.