Content area
Full Text
British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914. By Casper Andersen. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Pp. x+229. $99.
Casper Andersen's British Engineering and Africa, 1875-1914 is a thoughtprovoking book about the relationship between engineering and empire. Unlike other works that deal with this topic, its focus is on imperial projects imagined, arranged, evaluated, and contested in Britain, not the colonies. Written in dialogue with the new imperial history, Andersen avoids the pitfalls of diffusionism and Eurocentrism by insisting that empire manifested itself at home. Rather than examining empire as a thing out there in the world, he is adamant about tracking dynamic networks, investigating layered interactions, and probing messy nodes in the metropolitan center. Consequently, he draws readers into the complex ways the domination of far-offothers shaped lives and livelihoods in Britain.
Andersen deals with complicated themes, but his book is clearly written and nicely organized. The first chapter looks at the politics of professional journals, namely the circulation of imperial engineering dreams and the power of knowledge production. Chapter 2 offers a compelling spatial analysis of the London-based institutional sites where members of the...