This study of how the British central government pioneered the building of a road network from the early eighteenth century and then abandoned it to local governments during the mid-1830s began as a Ph.D. dissertation on the role of the state and the costs and benefits of a modern road network. This valuable contribution to the historiography of the Industrial Revolution challenges the widely held Victorian belief, often repeated by historians, that the building of Britain's transportation infrastructure was fundamental to uniting the nation and the creation of an enlightened, common, and commercial people. Guldi contends that the building of Britain's road network was a contentious issue that caused a good deal of political controversy and aggravated social and cultural divisions.

While the historiography has always included many works on the importance of the state in the British industrial revolution, the dominant view has been that this economic transformation occurred under a regime of laissez-faire or in spite of government interference. Even when state interference has been credited with promoting British economic growth, the focus has been on issues such as tariffs, naval power, empire, patents, property rights, and a political and legal system that made possible the building of privately funded turnpikes, canals, and railroads. One of the contributions of Guldi's book is her reminder that Britain's central government built and paid for a significant part of its trunk road system. Although there is a large specialist literature on British road building, there are few modern studies that treat the whole period from 1726 to 1848 that contain as much social, political, and cultural history. Moreover, Guldi's penchant for finding fascinating and telling details and anecdotes makes this a lively and enjoyable book. Her study is almost entirely based upon published sources, but she has cast her net widely and mined a wide variety of printed records and reports, periodical literature, parliamentary papers, contemporary books, printed maps, illustrations, and travel writing as well as an impressive list of secondary sources.

After a general introduction, Guldi begins with a chapter on the evolution of road making from a primarily military craft into one of civil engineering. She argues that while most historians have focused on the building of relatively short private turnpike roads, which mainly connected economic centers in the south of England, it was the fiscal-military state's road building in Scotland that pioneered innovations in surveying and building techniques, as well as the use of new materials, that built the great trunk roads that provided the model used for later civilian state road building. Begun in 1726 with the goal of subduing the Highland clans and safeguarding the nation from the Stuart Pretenders, this project evolved into a broader effort to develop Scotland's economy and to integrate it into the United Kingdom. The author argues that the real contribution of the celebrated civil engineers, such as Thomas Telford and John Louden Macadam, was not so much technical as political and professional. They were successful lobbyists who organized data produced by experts and convinced parliamentary committees to launch a massive civil scheme of centrally directed and financed state road construction, which built a modern road network connecting London, Edinburgh, and Dublin in the early nineteenth century.

In her second chapter, Guldi provides a detailed explanation of how the highway lobby created the model of the infrastructure state by marshaling the evidence for a British home colonization and economic development project. The road-building advocates, supported by Irish and Scottish landowners, built their case upon arguments based on national security, domestic economic development rooted in classical economics, a critique of the inefficiencies of existing local turnpike trusts, enlightenment arguments on the intellectual and moral benefits to be derived from better communication, and especially upon mountains of data produced by the new profession of civil engineers, which calculated the benefits that would come from a centrally organized British road system. The highway experts not only convinced Parliament to build major roads but also by 1835 required all turnpike trusts to adhere to common road standards. In her third chapter, Guldi explains how the highway lobby's centralization schemes produced a local reaction against road centralization. The expansion of the road network by Parliament and turnpike trusts meant that Britain's highways were now toll roads. Already in the eighteenth century there had been protests and riots against tolls. Guldi explains how a combination of radicals, rural Tories, and publicists from William Cobbett to Chartist leaders developed a critique of central government road building based on arguments that tolls did little for the poor and made them pay to walk, that state bureaucracies were inefficient and unaccountable to the public, that the limitless aims of the road builders were too expensive, and that government efforts to regulate and merge the turnpike trusts would saddle efficient trusts with the debts of poorly run ones. The result was that Parliament did not authorize the building of new government roads after 1836. Guldi provides an interesting explanation of how London gradually abolished tolls between 1822 and 1873. This local reform provided a model followed by other cities. Curiously, she does not discuss whether the competition of the new railways had an impact upon ending the funding of new road projects.

Guldi's final major topic and the book's most engaging chapter is a social and cultural history of the people who used Britain's roads during the period. She argues that the main users of the early roads were “mobile communities” (153) of strangers who banded together for security and companionship, especially soldiers, traveling tradesmen, itinerant Methodist preachers, seasonal workers, and Scottish and Irish migrants. Guldi argues that it was not until the introduction of the fast and scheduled Post Chaise in 1784 that the middling sort began to travel extensively. Instead of uniting the nation, as Macaulay famously argued, Guldi contends that the vast expansion of travel divided the nation between those who could afford the new coaches and those who continued to tramp the roads. Based on a wide variety of personal stories, literary sources, and travel writing, she argues that the Victorian road network did much to divide the nation into social classes and to limit the personal interactions among strangers.

In her concluding chapter, Guldi briefly explains how late Victorian cities and counties abolished the turnpike trusts and tolls and how Britain's central government assumed responsibility for its road network in the twentieth century. She unfortunately also burdens the book with a discussion of Britain's recent privatization of infrastructure, the failure of the United States to maintain its road network, Chinese investment in infrastructure, and how the Internet has become a toll highway. While Guldi's book certainly suggests reflections on these issues, the real value of the book is the historical tale she tells and its argument that road building is a good example of how an industrializing Britain was not shy in using the state to promote economic development.