Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840-1900

Racing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.