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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ A global history of the road Road construction, maintenance and use in Colombia, Argentina, French West Africa, and the Algerian Sahara, 1930-1970 Agredo Montealegre, Angelica Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. 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Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 A global history of the road Road construction, maintenance and use in Colombia, Argentina, French West Africa, and the Algerian Sahara, 1930-1970 Angelica Agredo Montealegre A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London Department of History 1 Declaration of originality This thesis represents my own work. Where the work of others is mentioned, it is duly referenced and acknowledged as such. Angelica Agredo Montealegre London 27 September 2019 2 Copyright declaration The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence. Researchers are free to copy, distribute or transmit the thesis on the condition that they attribute it, that they do not use it for commercial purposes and that they do not alter, transform or build upon it. For any reuse or redistribution researchers must make clear to others the licence terms of this work. 3 Abstract This thesis presents the first historical study of twentieth-century road construction and maintenance on a global scale, and the first comparative study of roads outside Europe and the United States (US). From 1930 to 1970, the roads of Latin America, Africa and Asia experienced considerable length increase and, especially in the post-1945 period, the modification of their material characteristics. This transformation enabled the road structures and surfaces to withstand the rapidly increasing heavy traffic of a globalising and nationalising world. This thesis shows the importance of unpaved roads and freight transport, particularly in the developing world. It argues that many roads, especially in the developing world, were built as what were called low-cost roads. Built down to a price, rather than up to a standard, low-cost roads were designed to last half as long as high-quality roads. However, these roads were meant to be upgraded over time, therefore making maintenance and improvements essential to ensure future circulation. In fact, this thesis shows that maintenance and upgradeability were the crucial factors that allowed low-cost roads to bear the rapidly growing heavy traffic of the post-1945 period. This thesis therefore represents a shift away from the main themes of the existing historiography, which focus on private automobiles, motorways, tourism and leisure, and policy for road building. This thesis makes the case for studying the materiality of twentieth-century roads. Road length alone did not guarantee the circulation of rising motor traffic: to talk holistically about roads is to talk about maintenance. Studying the physical properties of roads tells us not only about the link between maintenance, upgrades and the changing load-bearing capacity of roads, but also about the emergence of new road construction and maintenance tools and techniques that originated in the US and spread across the world. Indeed, adding to our understanding of the international influence of the US in the twentieth century, this thesis shows that American road-related standards, methods and equipment were the predominant model for the construction and maintenance of low-cost roads in the developing world, from the 1930s onwards, but especially during and after the Second World War. Professional networks of engineers, and their international exchanges, were crucial for the circulation and adaptation of this model to various environmental and traffic conditions across the world. This thesis focuses on the cases of the Algerian Sahara, French West Africa, Argentina and Colombia – allowing for a comparison of varied extreme natural environments and complex 4 relationships between rail and road transport. Yet, this thesis also discusses the work of American engineers in the US and abroad in the context of the Second World War, and the approaches of British and French engineers in their empires. This thesis emphasises the period after the Second World War, when the particularly rapidly expanding traffic of the developing world accelerated road development and the modernisation of road construction and maintenance processes. 5 Contents Abstract..........................................................................................................................4 List of Tables and Graphs...............................................................................................7 List of Figures................................................................................................................8 List of Abbreviations......................................................................................................9 Acknowledgements......................................................................................................12 Introduction..................................................................................................................14 Chapter 1 Low-cost roads: an overview of road development in the developing world, 1930-1970 ........................................................................................................ 55 Chapter 2 Defying the imagination: the techniques and tools that built the roads of the developing world, 1930-1970 ......................................................................... 88 Chapter 3 Building and maintaining roads in French West Africa and the Algerian Sahara, 1950-1962 ......................................................................................... 128 Chapter 4 Roads as railways: Argentina’s road development, 1930-1970 ................ 153 Chapter 5 The unintended role of maintenance in Colombian road development, 1950- 1970 ............................................................................................................... 190 Conclusion.................................................................................................................226 Annexes......................................................................................................................234 Bibliography..............................................................................................................258 6 List of Tables Table 3.1 Motor vehicle fleet in French West Africa in December 1956 .......................... 147 Table 4.1 Number of some of the most numerous machines owned by the Dirección Nacional de Vialidad and used for maintenance works (1943, 1958, 1968-69) ................................ 187 Table 5.1 Motor vehicle fleet by type of vehicle in Colombia, 1950-1970 (in percentage)208 List of Graphs Graph 1.1 Road length in Japan and the US in 1930, 1951 and 1970 (km) ......................... 58 Graph 1.2 Road length in selected countries in 1930, 1951 and 1970 (km) ......................... 60 Graph 1.3 Total and paved roads in selected countries in 1970 (km) .................................. 61 Graph 1.4 Estimated number of vehicles in circulation in selected countries in 1930, 1952 and 1970 (in thousands of vehicles) ......................................................................... 63 Graph 1.5 Estimated number of private cars and commercial vehicles in circulation in selected colonies and countries, January 1952 ....................................................................... 66 Graph 3.1 Distribution of volume carried by transportation method in French West Africa in 1957 (in millions of ton-km) .................................................................................. 144 Graph 4.1 Freight traffic by road and by railway in Argentina, 1950-1968 (millions of ton- km) ......................................................................................................................... 166 Graph 4.2 Motor vehicle registration in Argentina, 1954-1968 (thousands) ..................... 168 Graph 5.1 Evolution of road and rail investments from the Colombian National Government, 1951-1970 (millions of pesos of 1997) .................................................................