The Gospel of Concrete: American Infrastructure and Global Power
Open AccessThis dissertation is a cultural and social history of concrete, the second most consumed material on earth after water. It explains how the industry emerged in the United States, with cement industrialists taking lessons from unlikely teachers, including cotton manufacturers, scientists, and a host of military actors. “The Gospel of Concrete” also examines how this simple medium, made from a basic recipe that employs cement, sand, and water, was used by the United States to disseminate cultural and political power; the dissertation also pays attention to the role that the private industry played in shaping US involvement in global development efforts. With this material focus, “The Gospel of Concrete” makes three key arguments and interventions. First, I argue that the cement and concrete industries are rooted in racial capitalism that promoted the extraction of value from natural, animal, and human bodies. The industries strategically disassociated themselves from these histories, instead claiming that concrete was a permanent, scientific, and modern material; the dissertation therefore aims to correct the course. Second, I argue that the private industry collaborated with the state to create global markets for the dissemination of surplus material and technologies that shaped the manufacture and use of concrete on the global scale. In other words, concrete had obvious and particular utility for establishing US control of foreign lands, people, and other natural resources. And finally, by privileging an intersectional study of cement and concrete labor, I highlight a host of actors typically ignored in scholarship on concrete: from immigrant, Black, and female workers to natural landscapes and animals. “The Gospel of Concrete” therefore reimagines how extractive capitalism structures not only industries and built environments, but also laboring bodies and landscapes.
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