“The Road to Rule” challenges the traditional interpretation of the transport revolution, arguing for a process marked not by consensus but by conflict. It demonstrates that Britain's roads were the consequence not of grassroots markets, but rather of the expanding military-fiscal state. It shows that rather than uniting the nation, roads polarized the island's regions—English core and colonial periphery—around the issue of who should manage the roads and which groups should pay. It finally examines the early communities of travelers who used the roads and argues for their rapid disintegration into small communities of travelers unified by common trust, demonstrating that by 1830 strangers had stopped speaking to each other on the public highway. Conflict, rather than consensus, marked each phase of the building, management, and use of the roads.

Modern technologies of road-construction began with military road-building in Scotland after 1726 and the military mapping of Scotland in the 1740s and 50s, and were significantly advanced by the techniques of argument, presentation, and finance developed by parliamentary highway building after 1810. Centralized roads, the result of a lobby of Scottish and Irish landlords pressing for the better integration of the colonial periphery into the English markets, better integrated Ireland, Scotland and Wales to the English markets. Yet the parliamentary centralization of roads provoked a hostile political response in the form of a national movement against centralization, whose victory after 1835 meant the end to parliamentary road-building for the rest of the century.

Finally, the project explores the loyalties of soldiers on rotation, Methodists on circuit, and artisans on tramp, the early communities that made up the road's earliest users. These mobile communities were joined after 1785 by middling travelers who depended upon a world of inns and stagecoaches that cushioned them from interacting with people of different backgrounds. Quarantined by consumption from the dangers of travel, middling travelers had little need for the communities of trust that united others on the road.