James David Nichols, The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-Mexico Border

Abstract

British Columbia by the Road seeks not only to bring certain stories to light but also to frame these within broader ideas of Fordism and the impulses of an industrialising modern state. This is a potentially useful construct to work through the decades of British Columbia's modernisation and development, but unless readers are already familiar with critiques of twentieth-century economic development, Bradley's frequent references to Fordism may be a minor source of confusion as the term itself is not defined until the book's final chapter.Throughout the book, Bradley's writing is engaging and clear, however, and there is a surprising poignancy to some of the histories he presents. The initial missed opportunities and later manipulations to (re)establish historic towns of Barkerville and Fort Steele point to the ongoing tensions between commemoration and commercialisation. The flooding of the Big Bend Highway, the elimination of most of the sprawling Hamber Park, and the terminal clear-cutting of doomed forests-turned-reservoirs make evident that British Columbia by the Road is not a narrow academic tale, but rather an important accounting of how we have managed -or mis-managed -our relationships with history and the environment, even in some of North America's more remote landscapes. Bradley takes us to these remote towns and wilderness highways and challenges us to think about roads not only for what they do for us as travellers, but for what they have done to shape who we are and how we continue to inhabit or visit the places we hold dear.