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Impossible Engineering - Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Paperback)
Loot Price: R929
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Impossible Engineering - Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Paperback)
Series: Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The Canal du Midi, which threads through southwestern France and
links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was an astonishing feat of
seventeenth-century engineering--in fact, it was technically
impossible according to the standards of its day. Impossible
Engineering takes an insightful and entertaining look at the
mystery of its success as well as the canal's surprising political
significance. The waterway was a marvel that connected modern state
power to human control of nature just as surely as it linked the
ocean to the sea. The Canal du Midi is typically characterized as
the achievement of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and
entrepreneur for the canal. Yet Chandra Mukerji argues that it was
a product of collective intelligence, depending on peasant women
and artisans--unrecognized heirs to Roman traditions of
engineering--who came to labor on the waterway in collaboration
with military and academic supervisors. Ironically, while Louis XIV
and his treasury minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert used propaganda to
present France as a new Rome, the Canal du Midi was being
constructed with unrecognized classical methods. Still, the result
was politically potent. As Mukerji shows, the project took land and
power from local nobles, using water itself as a silent agent of
the state to disrupt traditions of local life that had served
regional elites. Impossible Engineering opens a surprising window
into the world of seventeenth-century France and illuminates a
singular work of engineering undertaken to empower the state
through technical conquest of nature.
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