His work has also appeared in The Journal of Modern History, American Historical Review, Technology and Culture, and Environmental History.
Denning applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Automotive Empire describes the changing nature of French automotive manufacturing in the decade before World War I and during the war itself. It focuses on the now-famous figures of André Citroën and Louis Renault, two manufacturers who spearheaded a revolution in French production away from bespoke, luxury vehicles and toward Fordist mass production that would bear fruit after World War I. Page 99 also begins to tell the story of Adolphe Kégresse, a French engineer who experimented with mounting cars on tank-like tracks to grapple with difficult terrain such as loose sand and heavy snow. The result was Citroën’s autochenille (caterpillar), a vehicle that Citroën was convinced could solve the challenge of the Sahara, which divided France’s North African territories (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) from the massive federation of French West Africa, then comprised of eight colonies.Learn more about Automotive Empire at the Cornell University Press website.
The Page 99 Test doesn’t give the best sense of Automotive Empire’s arguments and concerns. In fact, page 99 reflects much of the scholarship that has been written about colonial motoring in the past—focused on the actions of European manufacturers and engineers and concerned with technical innovation over everyday use and the effects of technology on individual lives—that this book seeks to expand beyond. As this chapter goes on to show, it was less the technological innovation than the dynamics of state and enterprise that proved significant. The close relationship between manufacturers like Citroën and French military and colonial officials in Africa and Paris forged what I call a colonial-industrial complex, wherein car manufacturers engaged in research and development to produce a so-called “colonial car” that could stand up to the elements and the more rudimentary road infrastructure in Africa. Within this complex, colonial authorities benefitted from the application of technical expertise to the colonial “transport problem,” while the manufacturers garnered attention and acclaim for their technical innovations and the desert tours and stress tests that received rapt attention in the French media on both sides of the Mediterranean.
This test is revealing of larger dynamics of the book, however, in that it offers the background to one of many European attempts to solve the intractable colonial “transport problem.” It exhibits a shared European project that connected colonies across European empires in Africa from 1895 to 1940. Although each empire developed its own solutions, Belgian, British, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese officials each saw automobiles and roads as solutions to the colonial transport problem. The background on French manufacturers from page 99 is indicative of a shared European assumption that technical capabilities could overcome the challenges posed by massive colonial territories, chronic underinvestment in African development, and disregard for the concerns and needs of their colonial subjects. Automotive Empire traces these ambitious European projects of colonial motorization and road construction in Africa, arguing that they created a shared form of “automotive empire” that explains why European colonial projects of this era were so coercive, as well as why they failed to accomplish European goals of organized governance and efficient economic extraction. As the book reveals, the answer lies in the gap between the perceived superiority of European technology and infrastructure and their actual use in Africa by a wide range of African and European drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.
Writers Read: Andrew Denning (December 2014).
The Page 99 Test: Skiing into Modernity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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