The Politics of Valuation: Building Attachments, “Taxing” Infrastructures, and Transforming Expert Work into Labor

As this Chapter shows, while IBEA engineers and administrators claimed their roads were bearers of “civilisation,” they leaned heavily on African topographical expertise. But administrators struggled to induce infrastructural workers to labor on routes of “commerce and civilisation,” which demanded a form of exertion that was at odds with prevailing theories of civilization and valuable work. At this conjuncture, Company administrators mobilized a Company currency, on the one hand, and new regimes of taxation, on the other, hoping they could bind people as labor to the road and the wage as they struggled to “find their tax.” These dynamics persisted when the Foreign Office took over, becoming the foundational logic of the early colonial state.