Reviewed by: Historicizing Infrastructure ed. by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rüdiger Jacob Anbinder (bio) Historicizing Infrastructure. Edited by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rüdiger. Aalborg, DK: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2016. Pp. 230. Hardcover $45. The things we build, why they are built, and the ways they are used illuminate the social structures and power relationships of the communities that build them. Sometimes, these things can seem to exert their own influence on human affairs—inanimate objects imbued with a latent kind of agency. Such has been historians' basic assertion at least since George Rogers Taylor wrote of the nineteenth-century plank-road mania in The Transportation Revolution (1951), and it can be found as well in more recent books such as William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991) and Andrew Need-ham's Power Lines (2014). In this way Historicizing Infrastructure, a volume of nine articles edited by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rüdiger, is ambitiously titled, since it implies that it will contextualize the concept of infrastructure from a historian's perspective in ways that Taylor, Needham, and dozens of other scholars have not. Many of its chapters, taken separately, are model works of scholarship, enjoyable to read, and will be useful to historians and others interested in the specific fields they cover. Marklund and Rüdiger orient their book around the concept of "materiality," or the idea that the physical characteristics of infrastructure can provide some form of insight into the mindsets of historical actors, the day-to-day nature of their lives, and maybe even some of the logic behind the decisions they made. Their point is entirely correct, but it is not as original as the editors make it out to be. The question Marklund and Rüdiger pose—how historians might approach a "vague and yet heavily technical" topic like infrastructure—has been answered quite well by authors dating at least as far back as Taylor (p. 5). In addition, lay readers will find that the sometimes jargon-heavy prose of Historicizing Infrastructure, with its mentions of "multistability" and an "epistemic re-orientation from text to things," makes it a difficult point of entry to the literature compared to some other books on the topic (pp. 15, 8). Fortunately, many of the authors in Historicizing Infrastructure demonstrate that "materiality" is best brought to life by applying it to specific historical moments rather than through theoretical discussion. Case in point: Zef Segal's excellent chapter, which compares and contrasts the development of postal and rail networks in various German states in the mid-nineteenth century. Following in the footsteps of Cronon, Peter Sahlins, and Eugen Weber, Segal is interested in how infrastructure networks influence (or don't influence) how community identity is made. In delineating the spread of mail and rail routes, Segal usefully distinguishes between accessibility—the degree to which a particular kind of infrastructure [End Page 791] is available to a given area—and connectivity, the extent to which any two nodes are linked by the network. The distinction is important, as it can play a large part in determining where people, goods, and information flow. A network that is centralized (the French road system, say) can have a nationalizing effect but also an extractive one, enabling the prosperity of the core at the expense of the periphery. A decentralized network (the American road system, say) can maintain the independence of far-flung areas at the expense of cohesion. Using Geographic Information Systems analysis, Segal concludes that certain German states developed infrastructure conducive to state "integration," while others did not. (Unfortunately, he leaves the definition of "integration" rather vague.) Infrastructure also has given ongoing societal debates new relevance and immediacy, as demonstrated in Marklund's fascinating chapter on the telegraph in nineteenth-century Denmark. Telegraphy, Marklund argues, "generated flows of information that proved difficult to control" (p. 138). Because telegrams required humans to translate the message from Morse code into readable text, the information they contained was inherently insecure. Disputes emerged between the telegraph office and judicial commissions over whether the Danish constitution's clause restricting "domiciliary search or seizure" protected the secrecy of telegraphic communications. Marklund demonstrates that this telegraph question was part...