Doctoral Dissertation Research: Building the Roads: Expertise, Labor, and Politics in France, 1720-1799

导言。这一研究项目将有助于加强一篇博士论文，该论文调查与18世纪政治文化和社会变革有关的社会多样化、合作的建设过程。该项目的重点是法国各省的道路建设。它的目标是分析专业知识、工人经验和当地公共工程项目的政治。这是可行的，因为从17世纪30年代到法国大革命，使用无偿的农村劳动力(在Corvée des Grands Chemins)作为主要的道路建设劳动力产生了大量的档案。以前的学者更喜欢研究道路建设的产品；因此，他们很少关注这些档案中展示的当地做法，尽管建设吸收了相当多的能量，这些能量来自家庭、村庄和省级行政当局。智力上的功绩。研究人员首先将地理焦点放在布列塔尼。他将研究工人、业主、工程师、教区议会、省级代表和皇家官员留下的档案文件。然后，他将对当地情况进行分析，并适当结合具体情况，包括Corvée的起源、地方道路建设在启蒙经济和法律理论中的共鸣以及革命的行政和意识形态变化。他还将使用数字地理信息系统地图来比较时间和空间上的区域数据。研究人员已经注意到，持续不断的改革有助于改变教区和省级文化；它也是关于正义和公用事业的王室和革命性论述的框架。这些档案反映了一个在军事、商业和行政举措与技术和财政限制之间权衡的社会。他对这些档案材料的使用将有助于更好地理解农村劳动力的多样化和流动性、城乡网络以及正式专业知识和默会知识的分配。它将有助于解释集体修建的高速公路是如何成为社区行动的世俗场所的，在那里，工人的数量超过了工程师，政治精英在早期的学术研究中被优先考虑。潜在的更广泛的影响。研究人员的论文将有助于揭示建筑工人隐身的劳动问题。因此，它可以提供对文化、政治和经济网络的洞察，这些网络将20名一世纪的建筑工人与当地人民和全球公司联系起来。让工人在他们的社会和政治环境中休养生息，照亮了丰富的工人与社区的联系。以书的形式出版这篇论文将有助于教育人们了解法国旧政权交通系统的社会影响，并对当前有关此类系统的当代同行的辩论产生影响。

Introduction. This research project will serve to enhance a doctoral dissertation that investigates the socially diverse, collaborative process of construction in relation to 18th century political culture and social change. The project focuses on road construction in provincial France. Its goal is to analyze expertise, worker experience, and the politics of local public works projects. This is feasible since the use of unpaid, rural labor (in the corvée des grands chemins) as the principal road construction workforce from the 1730s to the French Revolution generated extensive archives. Previous scholars have preferred to study the products of road construction; as a result, they gave little attention to local practices displayed in these archives, despite the considerable amount of energy that was absorbed by the construction, which was drawn from families, villages, and provincial administrations. Intellectual Merit. The researcher begins with a geographic focus on Brittany. He will study archival documents left by workers, property owners, engineers, parish assemblies, provincial representatives, and royal officials. He will then perform an analysis of local conditions that is to be suitably contextualized by including sections on the origins of the corvée, the resonance of local road construction in Enlightenment economic and legal theories, and Revolutionary administrative and ideological changes. He will also use digital GIS mapping to compare regional data over time and space. The researcher has already noted that constant corvée reforms served to transform parish and provincial culture; it also served as a framework for royal and revolutionary discourse on justice and public utility. The archives reflect a society juggling military, commercial, and administrative initiatives with technological and fiscal limitations. His use of these archival materials will contribute to a better understanding of diversification and mobility in rural labor, urban-rural networks, and distribution of formal expertise and tacit knowledge. It will serve to explain how collectively built highways became secular sites of community action where workers outnumbered engineers and political elites prioritized in earlier scholarship. Potential Broader Impacts. The researcher's dissertation will shed light on the labor issue of construction worker invisibility. As a result, it could provide insight into the cultural, political, and economic networks linking twenty first-century construction workers to local populations and global corporations. Resituating workers in their social and political environment illuminates rich worker-community links. Publication of this dissertation in book form will contribute to education about the social impact of transport systems in Old Regime France and have ramifications for current debates about contemporary counterparts to such systems.