This research project will serve to enhance a doctoral dissertation that investigates the socially diverse, collaborative process of construction in relation to 18th century political culture and social change. The project focuses on road construction in provincial France. Its goal is to analyze expertise, worker experience, and the politics of local public works projects. This is feasible since the use of unpaid, rural labor (in the corvée des grands chemins) as the principal road construction workforce from the 1730s to the French Revolution generated extensive archives. Previous scholars have preferred to study the products of road construction; as a result, they gave little attention to local practices displayed in these archives, despite the considerable amount of energy that was absorbed by the construction, which was drawn from families, villages, and provincial administrations.
Intellectual Merit. The researcher begins with a geographic focus on Brittany. He will study archival documents left by workers, property owners, engineers, parish assemblies, provincial representatives, and royal officials. He will then perform an analysis of local conditions that is to be suitably contextualized by including sections on the origins of the corvée, the resonance of local road construction in Enlightenment economic and legal theories, and Revolutionary administrative and ideological changes. He will also use digital GIS mapping to compare regional data over time and space. The researcher has already noted that constant corvée reforms served to transform parish and provincial culture; it also served as a framework for royal and revolutionary discourse on justice and public utility. The archives reflect a society juggling military, commercial, and administrative initiatives with technological and fiscal limitations. His use of these archival materials will contribute to a better understanding of diversification and mobility in rural labor, urban-rural networks, and distribution of formal expertise and tacit knowledge. It will serve to explain how collectively built highways became secular sites of community action where workers outnumbered engineers and political elites prioritized in earlier scholarship.
Potential Broader Impacts. The researcher's dissertation will shed light on the labor issue of construction worker invisibility. As a result, it could provide insight into the cultural, political, and economic networks linking twenty first-century construction workers to local populations and global corporations. Resituating workers in their social and political environment illuminates rich worker-community links. Publication of this dissertation in book form will contribute to education about the social impact of transport systems in Old Regime France and have ramifications for current debates about contemporary counterparts to such systems.
Archival research funded by this NSF grant significantly advanced Katherine McDonough’s dissertation on the politics, labor, and expertise of eighteenth-century highway construction in western France. During research in French departmental (county-level) archives, McDonough discovered new manuscript sources. They document the development of a professional, non-violent relationship between rural communities and regional authorities based on regular communication about roadwork. This dissertation studies the decentralized administrative practices in the western province of Brittany that encouraged new political and economic links within the region between elite and non-elite social groups as well as urban and rural communities. Daily experience in managing the new provincial road administration taught French nobles how to transform themselves into proficient public administrators. Contractors and engineers adapted urban building skills to become professional experts on rural construction sites. The mobilization of peasants, who had been accustomed to maintaining local roads since the medieval period, in a compulsory labor practice called the corvée des grands chemins was a major contributing factor to increased rural political activity in the eighteenth century. Nobles overseeing these peasants were no longer acting as local lords, but as regional administrators. Their collaboration with engineers and contact with rural workers transformed the traditional lord-peasant relationship into an administrator-citizen one. The new, public space of the road construction worksite was a laboratory for democratic activity long before 1789. Because pre-asphalt roads were in need of almost continuous maintenance, highways were permanent work sites in the French countryside throughout the eighteenth century. The technological and administrative control of highway construction began in the last years of the seventeenth century, boomed alongside highway spending in the wake of the war of Austrian Succession (1740-48), and fell into neglect during the Revolution. Lessons learned in the eighteenth century were not forgotten under Napoleon or the Restoration monarchs: their regional management polices and local maintenance plans stem from the successes and failures of the Old Regime. The compulsory labor of Old Regime France is an antecedent to colonial forced labor regimes and stands in marked contrast to nineteenth-century French railroad construction, which relied on immigrant labor. Understanding the origins of corvée labor in metropolitan France is instructive in connecting contemporary global labor issues to early modern practices. Preliminary results of dissertation research have been presented at conferences in France and in the US, including the Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne (September 1-3, 2011, Brest, France), and the Western Society for French History (November 10-12, 2011, Portland, Oregon). Qualitative and quantitative data from this dissertation is being used to create maps of regional and more local scales to examine spatial differentiation in construction activities. A new affiliation with the Stanford Spatial History Lab (Professor Zephyr Frank, director) provides technical support for the digital visualization of this data. A further collaboration between McDonough and Dr. Anne Conchon (Université de Paris I – Institut d’histoire économique et sociale), whose research focuses on the economic costs of compulsory labor on road construction in France, culminates in the co-presentation of a paper at the International Congress on Construction History (July 2012, Paris, France), and McDonough’s participation in a roundtable discussion on global compulsory labor organized by Conchon at the Université de Paris (July 2012).
