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Zusatztext "Chandra Mukerji crosses intellectual and disciplinary boundaries with incredible ease! mobilizing a vast array of scholarship to tackle historical cases in a new way." ---Frederic Graber! Technology and Culture Informationen zum Autor Chandra Mukerji is professor of communication and science studies at the University of California! San Diego. She is the author of Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles! A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State (Princeton)! and From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism . Klappentext ""Impossible Engineering" offers a fascinating account of the planning! construction! and interpretation of a major public-works project in seventeenth-century France. Mukerji stresses the participation of many people who have often have been written out of this story! especially the peasant workforce! which included a significant contingent of women. She also raises large general issues about the modes and limitations of human interaction with the natural world. I read this book with great pleasure."--Harriet Ritvo! Massachusetts Institute of Technology"Drawing on a vast array of original archival data! "Impossible Engineering" offers an elegant and original analysis of a feat of engineering! the construction of the Canal du Midi. Mukerji weaves various strands of the story with impressive dexterity to produce an account that is undoubtedly that of a scholar at the top of her game. This is a fascinating and theoretically significant study."--Michele Lamont! Harvard University Zusammenfassung 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. This book looks at the mystery of its success as well as the canal's surprising political significance. Inhaltsverzeichnis Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xvii Introduction xix Chapter 1: Impossible Engineering 1 Chapter 2: Territorial Politics 15 Chapter 3: Epistemic Credibility 36 Chapter 4: New Rome Confronts Old Gaul 60 Chapter 5: Shifting Sands 91 Chapter 6: The New Romans 117 Chapter 7: Thinking Like a King 154 Chapter 8: Monumental Achievement 176 Chapter 9: Powers of Impersonal Rule 203 Notes 229 Bibliography 277 Index 293 ...
