During the privatization craze of the 1980s, libertarians advocated toll roads as the cure for America’s “crumbling infrastructure” problem. As Gerald Gunderson writes in “Privatization and the 19th-Century Turnpike,” Americans invented an “ingenious” market mechanism for supplying its road deficit: the public–private partnership. However, as libertarian commentator Timothy B. Lee concedes: “Roads are deeply intertwined with governments. They always have been and as far as I can see they always will be. This means that theyll never be truly private in the sense that other private companies like restaurants or shoe factories can be.” Chapter 3 illustrates Lee’s insight and argues that highways and roads were a defining feature of “publicness” in the American antebellum experience. Although turnpikes were organized as private businesses and charged tolls in order to recoup considerable investment and turn a profit, in the end they could really not be operated as private businesses: they were inherently political undertakings that required the participation of legislatures, courts, investors, and the general public. Moreover, turnpikes were built in a field of political contestation in which Americans often resisted the privatization of customary public spaces.

Chapter 10 provides the first extensive commentary on a famous appendix to the Tour devoted to the new turnpike system, and documents the extent of Defoe’s knowledge of English highways, built up over many decades and covering large segments of the nation. As well as displaying his intimate knowledge of the commercial and economic activity of the nation, both internal and external, the book feeds on a lifetime of journeys across his homeland. This chapter seeks to describe major features of the account, to indicate its timeliness, and to explain the factors which enabled Defoe to provide an unrivalled picture of the communications network of his time. His appendix furnishes a comprehensive survey of road conditions, as part of the author’s overall design to show the interdependence of separate regions of the country, bound together in a circulation system centred on London. It connects with numerous observations throughout the the Tour regarding the road system and the state of the highways that served to link various stages of the narrative.