Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis: The War for the American Interior and the Infrastructural Routes of Revolution

Join us to discuss Alec Zuercher Reichardt’s new book, Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis: The War for the American Interior and the Infrastructural Routes of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

The construction of imperial communications infrastructure led to British victory in the Seven Years’ War, yet it was also the empire’s undoing, laying the roads to Revolution.

Centering on the eighteenth-century struggle for the greater Ohio Valley, this book uncovers a much larger imperial competition, one for control over Atlantic and North American information and transportation networks. By the height of the Seven Years’ War, this contest had propelled Britain to construct imperial infrastructure that outpaced the efforts of France, its primary European rival, and that successfully co-opted Indigenous ally channels. However, the rise of the British North American infrastructure state was also the empire’s downfall. The same roads, printing presses, and postal networks constructed and funded by the War Office and imperial treasury quickly also became the primary routes for those revolutionaries who sought to oppose the British state.

Alec Reichardt is Associate Professor of History and Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He received his BA from Duke and his PhD from Yale University. A historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, he’s published essays and articles on the global eighteenth-century British Empire, French military infrastructure, Indigenous textual translation, as well as a co-edited collection, Inlands: Empires, Contested Interiors, and the Connection of the World (Columbia University Press, 2024).