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sophia_sol) wrote2016-07-15 09:43 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2016-07-15 09:43 pm
Dreams of Iron and Steel, by Deborah Cadbury
Dreams of Iron And Steel: Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal, by Deborah Cadbury
This book does nearly what it says on the tin. Two of the seven wonders it discusses are actually from the early 20th century!
The seven projects:
It is an interesting and well written book, and I enjoyed the reading of it. And I certainly learned things! But I had definite frustrations and concerns.
For starters, the book was rather more invested in great man history than I am. Each of the seven sections had undue (imo) levels of attention focused on the visionary men who spearheaded the projects instead of all the people who were necessary to its realization. Though at least the book didn't ignore the existence of the workers entirely!
And the railway chapter makes me uncomfortable with its rhetoric about how great this railway was for bringing the US together into one country, when earlier it talks about the (very real!) concerns the Native people had about how the railway was an exception to the land treaty and how their way of life would be eradicated. Apparently that doesn't matter because country-building is more important! And a lot of the violence between the Native people and the railroad construction crews is framed as "look at this incredible difficulty the railways had to overcome!!" instead of really feeling like it ever sympathized with the Native perspective of trying to defend against colonialism. So that sucked. Also all the rhetoric about how obedient the Chinese workers were was rather unfortunate.
The Chinese and Native people never got humanized the way the (clearly pretty terrible!) white men leading the project did. And the way some of the white men's horribleness was casually brushed aside in a single sentence was appalling too, like how the wife of one of them was afraid of him whenever he came home, and this is portrayed as an example of how obsessed he is with the railroad instead of an example of how he is a TERRIBLE PERSON.
So yeah. The railroad chapter was the worst for this kind of stuff, because racism and sexism is apparently particularly front-and-centre when talking about 19th century US, but the book as a whole is kinda like that. (I mean, the author has the sort of mindset that leads her to use the terminology of "man" to refer to humans!)
And the other thing is how not all these projects were like...good ideas? I'm thinking particularly of the Great Eastern. And yet the book has nothing but good to say about all of this, as if the massive ego of white men to take on ridiculously outsized projects and succeed on the backs of the dead/injured lower classes is an admirable trait or something. And several of these projects are inescapably colonialist in nature: The Great Eastern, with its Australia intentions; the US railroad with its western expansionism; the Panama Canal, which takes place entirely in Panama and yet there are maybe two sentences about Panamanians (one of which is an offhand mention of the fact that the manmade* lake floods lots of villages) because the entire project is so white-driven.
I did mostly enjoy reading the book though. I was particularly riveted by the chapter on the Bell Rock lighthouse. And I bet I would have also been particularly riveted by the sewer chapter if I didn't already know a lot of what it was discussing. And probably the Brooklyn bridge chapter would have been more interesting to me if I hadn't listened to a podcast episode on the same topic not too long ago that very deliberately focused much more on the experiences of the workers than on the chief engineers.
So in conclusion, if you don't mind a book written from the unexamined perspective of white colonialist patriarchy this book is worth a look. But really. Can't we please be over this kind of thing?
*I use this word consciously. It was men.
This book does nearly what it says on the tin. Two of the seven wonders it discusses are actually from the early 20th century!
The seven projects:
- The Great Eastern
- The Bell Rock lighthouse
- The Brooklyn bridge
- The London sewers
- The US transcontinental railroad
- The Panama Canal
- The Hoover Dam
It is an interesting and well written book, and I enjoyed the reading of it. And I certainly learned things! But I had definite frustrations and concerns.
For starters, the book was rather more invested in great man history than I am. Each of the seven sections had undue (imo) levels of attention focused on the visionary men who spearheaded the projects instead of all the people who were necessary to its realization. Though at least the book didn't ignore the existence of the workers entirely!
And the railway chapter makes me uncomfortable with its rhetoric about how great this railway was for bringing the US together into one country, when earlier it talks about the (very real!) concerns the Native people had about how the railway was an exception to the land treaty and how their way of life would be eradicated. Apparently that doesn't matter because country-building is more important! And a lot of the violence between the Native people and the railroad construction crews is framed as "look at this incredible difficulty the railways had to overcome!!" instead of really feeling like it ever sympathized with the Native perspective of trying to defend against colonialism. So that sucked. Also all the rhetoric about how obedient the Chinese workers were was rather unfortunate.
The Chinese and Native people never got humanized the way the (clearly pretty terrible!) white men leading the project did. And the way some of the white men's horribleness was casually brushed aside in a single sentence was appalling too, like how the wife of one of them was afraid of him whenever he came home, and this is portrayed as an example of how obsessed he is with the railroad instead of an example of how he is a TERRIBLE PERSON.
So yeah. The railroad chapter was the worst for this kind of stuff, because racism and sexism is apparently particularly front-and-centre when talking about 19th century US, but the book as a whole is kinda like that. (I mean, the author has the sort of mindset that leads her to use the terminology of "man" to refer to humans!)
And the other thing is how not all these projects were like...good ideas? I'm thinking particularly of the Great Eastern. And yet the book has nothing but good to say about all of this, as if the massive ego of white men to take on ridiculously outsized projects and succeed on the backs of the dead/injured lower classes is an admirable trait or something. And several of these projects are inescapably colonialist in nature: The Great Eastern, with its Australia intentions; the US railroad with its western expansionism; the Panama Canal, which takes place entirely in Panama and yet there are maybe two sentences about Panamanians (one of which is an offhand mention of the fact that the manmade* lake floods lots of villages) because the entire project is so white-driven.
I did mostly enjoy reading the book though. I was particularly riveted by the chapter on the Bell Rock lighthouse. And I bet I would have also been particularly riveted by the sewer chapter if I didn't already know a lot of what it was discussing. And probably the Brooklyn bridge chapter would have been more interesting to me if I hadn't listened to a podcast episode on the same topic not too long ago that very deliberately focused much more on the experiences of the workers than on the chief engineers.
So in conclusion, if you don't mind a book written from the unexamined perspective of white colonialist patriarchy this book is worth a look. But really. Can't we please be over this kind of thing?
*I use this word consciously. It was men.