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Introduction

The historical archaeology of sanitation reform in the USA describes a continuum between households that are “off the grid” – infrastructurally self-contained and relatively independent in regards to the management of waste and water – and households that are integrated into the “networked infrastructure” (Graham and Marvin 2001: 8) of municipal sanitary systems. Many have realized that there is a crucial relationship between these variables and local governance; discussion of privy abandonment and sanitation reform often follows a sequence of public laws authorizing certain privy forms and means of disposing of night soil and other waste (Demeter 1994; Ford 1994; Geismar 1993; Howson 1992/1993; Meyer 2004; Mrozowski et al. 1989; Parrington 1983; Stone 1979; Stottman 1995, 2000). Embedded in this narrative, wherein regulation and governance prompt an improvement in sanitation and public health, are many taken for granteds regarding the nature of government and the relationships that ­governance implies: the action of power to bring about regulation, observation, and surveillance of households and populations, abstractions and epistemologies of ­government, and so forth. Taken together, these matters remind us that government itself has a history, that there are styles of government from region to region and period to period, and that archaeological features, like privies and sewers – which produced this visibility of government in the first place – might allow us to expose these styles of local/regional/state government and increase the scope of urban historical archaeo­logy beyond the house lot or the city block. “Because much of contemporary urban life is precisely about the widening and intensifying use of networked infrastructures to extend social power, the study of the configuration, management and use of such ­networks needs to be at the centre, not the periphery, of our theories and analyses of the city and the metropolis” (Graham and Marvin 2001: 34).

I propose that the extension of government through technologies of infrastructure in this North American context is homologous to the vision of capitalism in colonial contexts that gives this volume its theme. “Politics is also technics. The ‘art of ­government’ is part and parcel with the ‘technologies of government’” (Henman 2006: 206). Peter Pels extends this notion in his review of the anthropology of colonialism, drawing a strong connection between Western governmentality, read as “a set of universalistic technologies of domination – a Statistik or ‘state-craft’” (Pels 1997: 165), and the contexts and processes of colonialism that the contributors to this volume address. While there are important differences, perhaps most notably the militarization and overt repression that is present in colonial contexts, aspects of governmentality and especially the technical basis for operationalizing knowledge represent a commonality across these contexts. For most of anthropology, the problematization of government begins with Foucault’s historical essay on the emergence of governmentality and liberalism (Foucault 1991) which is included in Sharma and Gupta’s more recent reader The Anthropology of the State (Sharma and Gupta 2006). The themes and concepts that have emerged from this literature can help historical archaeologists in North America to find new focus in questions of government and power; the resulting engagement between “Western” or “local” and “colonial” or “foreign” contexts would be more closely aligned with the very hybrid nature of colonialism itself. Technology has long been a focus of anthropological investigations into the histories of colonialism (Kaplan 1995; Mrázek 2002; Pemberton 1994; Scott 1998). What are the historical and cultural implications of similar techniques being applied both to Western and colonial contexts? Is the framework of internal colonization (e.g., Caprotti 2007, 2008; Pfaffenberger 1990) legitimately applied to the history of government and its techniques in Western settings? How are the outcomes of projects of modernization – really projects to promote economic development that produce a surplus of consequences (Ferguson 1994) – comparable across these contexts? Are these projects executed simultaneously or is one modeled after the successes of the other? To explore these questions, I present accounts of the development of sanitary infrastructure in Annapolis, Maryland, and also of a gradual transition in the way that the City of Annapolis was governed, which hinged upon new discursive and technical apparatuses of which sanitation was a part.

Annapolis is a medium-sized city on the Severn River, one of seven rivers flowing east that contribute to the vast estuary of the Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis was settled during the seventeenth century and became the capital for the Maryland colony in 1694; it was an economic power as well as a political center for the colony during the mid-eighteenth century, and is still the capital of Maryland and home to the state government. During the early nineteenth century, Annapolis was overshadowed economically by Baltimore to the north, which experienced greater industrial development and also had a far deeper port and greater shipping capacity (Leone 2005: 5–6). Annapolis faced considerable economic decline, which Matthews (2002) addresses very closely. Events in Annapolis during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including its reconfiguration as a historic city and a showcase for Maryland’s colonial heritage, even its eventual gentrification, occur against a backdrop of deep economic fretfulness. Matthews relates the earliest efforts to modernize Annapolis as explicit attempts to tie the city more securely into the political economy for the region in terms of transit and shipping, but also in the provision of urban infrastructure that would attract industry. Elites in Annapolis invested in the industrialization of light and water, with the establishment of gas light and ­municipal water utilities during the mid-nineteenth century (Matthews 2002: 23–25, 99–113). An extensive infrastructural network developed in Annapolis over the second half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, but on a much smaller scale than neighboring Baltimore or Washington D.C. (Fig. 12.1).

Fig. 12.1
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Detail of a regional plan published in 1937, depicting networked water and sewer infrastructure for Annapolis (east), Baltimore (north), and Washington D.C. (west) (Maryland State Planning Commission 1937: 52)

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The historical installation of broad municipal services in Annapolis, and arguably other places, constituted a new city that was buried under, erected over, and extended throughout the old. Utilities traced out existing relationships between people and institutions, and just as importantly they fixed those relationships in new ways with material forms. But further, the infrastructural networks that penetrated homes and at some point inevitably articulated with bodies also established an entirely new relationship among persons, things, and wider society. As material culture, the apparatuses for moving sewage and clean drinking water around the city performed in ways that material culture never had before. These networks were predicated on and incorporated new forms of authority, and engaged people in distinctive ways (e.g., Hughes 1983; Marcuse 1982; Schivelbusch 1988). In short, networks of utilities give evidence to a new materiality that developed during the later nineteenth century and came to define governed urban life (Graham and Marvin 2001; Osborne 1996; Palus 2005). This materiality was not limited to urban places, but rather extended to include rural areas during the early twentieth century, for instance with rural electrification, telephone, or irrigation networks (Fitsgerald 2002; Kline 2000). As these technologies were introduced in rural or urban contexts, there was a meeting of different materialities or different “object worlds” (Meskell 2004: 2) such that one order of things, one system for organizing people, their homes and material lives, and their communities and their government was displaced or hybridized with another (after Castree 2006).

In the State of Maryland, government is historically trim with few governmental units or jurisdictions outside of the state government and the municipalities, the latter including counties and cities to whom a generous degree of “home rule” is delegated by the state (Spencer 1965: 2–4). Governmental authority in the USA is structured by a federation in which the federated states share their sovereignty with the federal government under the U.S. Constitution. A state in this context has much the same meaning as a state or a province in many other countries. Under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, powers not specifically delegated to the federal government and not prohibited to the states are reserved for state governments. Individual state constitutions establish the delegation of powers to increasingly local levels of government. Counties represent the basic administrative division within most states and enclose large territories of urban and rural development. County governments in Maryland, as in many of the states, developed primarily around juridical and administrative record-keeping functions, such as registering ownership of land. In contrast, cities incorporated as municipalities are historically service-oriented in ways that the counties are not and provided for “regulation of public conduct and public health, the construction and maintenance of public thoroughfares and buildings, and … the provision of limited protective – fire and police – services” (Spencer 1965: 6).

Urban archaeology in other North American settings has already demonstrated that the regulation of public conduct and public health has an origin that can be located archaeologically as well as discursively. In the archaeological studies referenced earlier in this introduction, the historical discourses on what Martin Melosi (2000) calls the “sanitary idea” or Graham and Martin’s related notion of a “modern infrastructural ideal” (2001: 43) are used to explain the abandonment of privies and vaults as a system for managing wastes, and the embrace of networked infrastructure as the underpinnings of urban political economy. Considered more broadly, the regulation of conduct, exemplified here in the project of promoting public health, could also connect the historical modernization of municipal government with the modernization of its infrastructure. Authority is translated into material networks, becoming both unavoidable and to the extent that it is buried and forgotten, invisible (Williams 2008). In this sense, the sources and expressions of local governmental authority changed during the early twentieth century in a way that can be located archaeologically.

The substance of this paper is an examination of public services, specifically networked water, and sanitation infrastructure as the material culture of a political annexation, just as infrastructural improvements frequently represent a constituent material component of colonization. In 1951, the City of Annapolis annexed a neighboring community called Eastport and several other neighboring communities that had grown up around it over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Evening Capital [EC] 1950a). I consider the legal annexation of the Eastport community as the culmination of a long-term process, and I locate its foundations in the provision of public utilities, viewing infrastructural improvements as the gradual extension of government into new territory and more importantly the enclosure of new populations. In particular, I look at a large sanitation project that took place between 1933 and 1937, which included both Annapolis and its newly constituted “metropolitan area,” under the authority of an entirely new level of government between county and city, designated in 1931 as the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage Commission. The Eastport community, as part of the suburban fringe, was effectively governed by the City of Annapolis before it was annexed politically not only by the services that Annapolis provided, but also by the administrative apparatus that accompanied services. In the early twentieth century, the Annapolis city government was transitioning from a system rooted in nineteenth-century patronage toward liberal government. Documentary and archaeological data on construction of sewer, water, and storm drain infrastructure during the early twentieth century make this transition especially visible and open up these styles of government to discussion.

In looking at Eastport, I propose a frame in which disparate services are taken together as the materiality of its annexation and ultimately suggest that governmentality has its own materiality, which is legible in public utilities during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, I suggest an examination of these features as the material culture of governing a population, rather than placing them immediately into the cultural context of sanitation. This is to say that sewers are about sanitation, but they are also about governing and power. The archaeological literature on sanitation and public health bore this possibility already; this essay presents my attempt to apply it in order to reveal “how the outcomes of planned social interventions can end up coming together into powerful constellations of control that were never intended and in some cases never even recognized” (Ferguson 1994: 19).

Eastport’s Trajectory to Annexation

The community of Eastport is located on the western shore of the Severn River, on the first peninsula south of Annapolis called Horn Point (Fig. 12.2). In 1868, it was platted with 256 home sites on just over 100 acres of land by the Mutual Building Association of Annapolis, a corporation of investors from Annapolis and the surrounding county. Over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the neighborhood filled in with homes, churches, and businesses. Diverse classes settled there with emphasis on the maritime trades, such as boat building, oystering, and oyster shucking and packing. However, Eastport was also a pool of labor and domestic workers for neighboring Annapolis, and especially its major employer, the United States Naval Academy, a training center founded in Annapolis in 1845 as the naval equivalent to the U.S. military academy for the army at West Point. Thirty percent of Eastport households had at least one member employed at the Naval Academy at the time of the 1930 U.S. Census (Census 1930). Eastport existed as a distinct community in Anne Arundel County under the jurisdiction of the county government until it was annexed into the City of Annapolis in 1951 along with a number of other communities, making Annapolis the fourth largest city in the state of Maryland (Abdo et al. 1996: 4).

Fig. 12.2
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Detail of 1892 topographic map depicting development and waterways around Annapolis and Eastport, also called Horn Point (U.S. Geological Survey 1892)

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There was a minor building boom during the mid-1880s when a glass factory was established in Horn Point and a number of glass blowers settled in the neighborhood with their families. By 1886, there was a public school in Horn Point, several stores, and a shoemaker, in addition to the glass factory (EC 1886c). Back Creek was bridged in 1886, connecting Horn Point with agricultural land and beaches further south and creating a direct route for truck farmers and excursionists traveling between Annapolis and an area further south called Bay Ridge (EC 1886a). Opined a writer for the Evening Capital, a newspaper founded in Annapolis in 1884, “This village is assuming great proportions compared to what it has been some years back, and its close proximity to Annapolis, and its easy access, will no doubt, in the near future, be made an annex to the ‘Ancient city’” (EC 1886b). This speculation on annexation – whether figurative or literal – is important because it establishes that the possibility of annexation and the presumed relationship between settlement in Horn Point and the growth of capital in Annapolis were alive in local discourses from the earliest development of the Eastport community. Settlers in Horn Point addressed this notion in a very direct way when they moved to incorporate their village in 1887, but the idea of annexation, and the discursive link between settlement and development in Horn Point/Eastport, and the accumulation of capital in Annapolis never faded, even where annexation itself was viewed negatively.

For instance, a meeting of Horn Point residents was held in May of 1887, in which local patriarch Charles J. Murphy stated his position on incorporating as an independent town:

You are well aware that our village is growing in size and importance every day … The question will be submitted to you tonight as to whether this village shall at some future time become a part of the city of Annapolis, and I trust that before you vote upon this question that you will give it deep thought as it must have a lasting effect upon your prosperity in the future. And I would also state that in the future this little meeting, simple as it may appear to us now, will be referred to as the pioneer meeting of what, may, at some time, become a great commercial city … In regard to the matter of annexation to the city of Annapolis, I oppose such an act, for we cannot possibly reap any advantages there from … and should this village be annexed to the adjoining city our taxes would be nearly doubled without any equivalent return for the same. (EC 1887)

As indicated in Murphy’s comments (reminiscent of certain scenes in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood), the premier matter that was voted on at the meeting was “Shall the village of Horn Point become now, or at any future time, a part of the corporation of Annapolis city?” The vote went unanimously against (EC 1887). While the seeming democracy of this moment may argue against the comparison with colonial contexts, plainly annexation was accomplished, and I argue here that infrastructure was the vehicle.

Beyond the seeming importance of Eastport as a zone for capital to grow outside of Annapolis, the living space that was opened up in Horn Point by its subdivision in 1868 created a historically important opportunity for African Americans to obtain homes, land, and therein prosperity. Few African Americans participated in the speculative moment that saw all land in Eastport transferred from the Mutual Building Association to other ownership between 1868 and 1900.Footnote 1 Yet census data reported between 1910 and 1930 show consistent increases in African American homeownership, until African Americans in Eastport match the rate of homeownership reported among families within the community that were enumerated as “white” (Palus forthcoming). By 1930, African American homeownership in Eastport far outstripped rates reported for African Americans in the City of Annapolis and also surrounding Anne Arundel County. Generally in Maryland, the rate of African American homeownership is higher in rural areas than in urban centers, such as Baltimore, perhaps revealing the degree to which suburban development created such opportunities. Slightly more than 60% of African American households in Eastport owned or mortgaged their homes in 1930, compared with 44% of African American households throughout the surrounding county and 22% of those in the City of Annapolis (Census 1910, 1920, 1930; Rogers 1918: 466–501; Steuart 1922: 1,282–1,283; Steuart 1933: 573–589).

There is generally a pattern of metropolitan population growth in Maryland between 1930 and 1960. In the development of several heavily populated urbanized counties, including Baltimore County surrounding the City of Baltimore, Prince George’s County, and Montgomery County surrounding Washington, D.C., and Anne Arundel County surrounding Annapolis, population growth occurs outside of incorporated municipalities rather than within them (Spencer 1965: 8–11). This pattern accurately describes circumstances in the Annapolis area, where suburban expansion took place beyond its corporate limits within a series of neighboring unincorporated communities, like Eastport. Overall, in Maryland, the response to this pattern of metropolitan population growth was considerable transformation in the operation of government and the reallocation of authority:

… the reallocation of functional responsibilities, the creation of special districts, the establishment of new intergovernmental agencies and cooperative programs, and, of primary importance, the entrance of some county governments into what has previously been a traditional responsibility of municipal government. (Spencer 1965: 12)

By way of example, the State of Maryland approved an act allowing the creation of a Sanitary Commission in Anne Arundel County in 1922, granting the commission authority to lay out sanitation districts and to construct water and sewerage systems. That act specifically excluded the City of Annapolis from the authority of this commission, and the first county sanitary districts were set up further north in Anne Arundel County in communities closer to Baltimore (Maryland 1924). The creation of the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage District in 1931 would be another example of these coping strategies, allowing services to be provided to a population living largely outside of incorporated towns.

At the same time, it must be recognized that suburban populations, like those persons settling in the Eastport community, elected to take up residence outside of incorporated cities. The belt of development surrounding Annapolis, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and other urban centers in the region became semiautonomous zones, where African American wealth and political capital were concentrated (Johnson 2002). Such suburban communities, whatever their racial composition, are economically bound to adjacent urban markets, but they represent sovereign spaces as well. The absence of infrastructure is part of what makes them so. Households utilizing wells and privies have a tangible independence; they refuse the commodification of water resources and also elide the scriptural onus that accompanies networked infrastructure. These are households that leave a smaller historical footprint, a population that is less clearly visible to the apparatuses for governing because they are not so firmly engaged with the instrumentation that renders population visible. The expansion of service on a regional scale, as illustrated in Fig. 12.1 above, encloses and finally makes visible these spaces of suburban sovereignty, capturing population and wealth for the city to govern.

While special-purpose metropolitan districts assert a new level of government between the city and the county, the problem of providing services to suburban population can also be resolved through outright annexation of land. Annexation was the dominant mode of city growth during the nineteenth century, and other forms of city–county consolidation were influential in concept from ca. 1900 to 1945; however, the legislative maneuvers necessary to build these new entities were difficult to complete (Horan and Taylor 1977: xiii–xvi). Several annexations took place in Baltimore during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Population growth just outside of the corporate limits in Baltimore County resulted in a “Belt” of settlement around Baltimore with over 40,000 inhabitants by the mid-1880s. Efforts within the city to annex this territory began early in the second half of the nineteenth century. The State Constitution enacted in 1864 prohibited the transfer of territory from one county to another without the consent of the people in the territory, signified with a referendum vote on the annexation (Arnold 1978: 113–115). By this measure, Baltimore County and the City of Baltimore, which was treated like another county, campaigned for votes with the promise of services:

City leaders were almost always anxious to expand the municipal tax base and political power, but during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had to secure the consent of those to be annexed. The city thus had to make its offer attractive enough to win suburban favor, but no so attractive as to endanger municipal finances. (Arnold 1978: 109)

A referendum on annexation of “The Belt” into the City of Baltimore failed in 1874, but passed by a popular vote in 1888 with the added conditions of partial tax amnesty and tax freezes for 12 years following annexation. In anticipation of the 1920 census and with an eye on its standing among other American cities, Baltimore worked toward another annexation that was accomplished in 1918. This second annexation was accomplished through an act of the State Legislature, the “Greater Baltimore Bill,” following a challenge to the constitutional requirement for a referendum on county-to-city as opposed to county-to-county transfers of territory (Arnold 1978).

There are few constitutional controls on the Maryland state government, where legislating the local is concerned. Conversely, because the Maryland Constitution prohibits little in the way of local legislation, much is accomplished at the local level through proposals to the legislature of “general–local” laws, often submitted by a senator or delegate from the county who acts as a legislative chief within that jurisdiction (Spencer 1965: 16). In other words, localities act through the state’s power to legislate the local to accomplish desired programs at home, submitting legislative acts through their local delegates. This pattern was seen throughout the government records for the City of Annapolis during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the legal councilor for the city drafts and submits state legislation addressing extraordinarily local concerns. The apparent relationship and interplay between municipal government in Annapolis and the state’s lawmakers do not owe especially to Annapolis’ role as state capital and home to the legislature, but rather describe the relationship of state power to local government throughout Maryland.

The intervention of the state government during the 1920s and 1930s was crucial in the conception and creation of the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage District and arguably in the reform and transformation of local government that accompanied this new governmental entity. Federal dollars fed into the project as well, though the district was established on paper and underway well before the organization of the Works Projects Administration (WPA), a federal agency created to promote economic recovery during the Great Depression by putting the unemployed to work largely on public projects. Federally funded public work projects during the Great Depression enabled many small- and medium-sized cities in the USA to install sanitation infrastructure and provide for treatment of sewage (Melosi 2000: 162–163, 210–211), but it is not clear to what degree federal intervention enabled the construction of new sanitation infrastructure in Annapolis during this period. Overall federal involvement in sanitation projects in Annapolis increased after 1934, beginning with some investment from the Civil Works Administration (CWA), precursor to the WPA (Annapolis 1935, 01/08/1934; McWilliams 2009).

Eastport, thus, developed as part of the suburban fringe of Annapolis, and the context for the annexation of Eastport is the “metropolitanization” of Annapolis. Metropolitanization is a trend in municipal government that began in the USA ­during the early twentieth century. It is a movement to improve the efficiency of government by reorganizing jurisdiction and authority and mapping a new governmental entity onto a complicated historical topography (Miller 2002; Sancton 2000; Stephens and Wikstrom 2000). I argue that constructions like sewer and water infrastructure at once materialize governmental power as it was extended into Eastport, and moreover that they lend themselves toward a certain kind of government. This discussion, therefore, draws together a complex formed from three things: first, a move from Annapolis seen as a small town with tight boundaries on its jurisdiction and authority toward Annapolis seen as a metropole; second, the modernization of Annapolis’ government such that it came to resemble the form of rule that Foucault termed “governmentality” (1991); and third, the physical infrastructure that was put into the ground, as an archaeological trace and an apparatus that is central to both of these. I am composing a reply to a question posed by Mitchell Dean in his 1999 text on governmentality: “by what means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics, techniques, technologies and vocabularies is authority constituted and rule accomplished?” (1999: 31) Here, Dean is specifically addressing the style of government, its instrumentation, and, arguably, its materializations.

Governmentality, Techni, and Liberalism

Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was an intensification and elaboration of government in Annapolis, an increase in the number and variety of governmental mechanisms aimed at providing for the health, safety, and security of the city’s population. Especially relevant to Eastport is the documentary and archaeological data on two of these mechanisms and their infrastructural expressions: municipal water and sewer systems, which developed in Annapolis during the late 1860s and were extended into Eastport during the 1920s and 1930s. These systems each manifested concerns for cleanliness and public health, and they reflected the growing influence of the “sanitary idea” (Melosi 2000) in Annapolis during the later nineteenth century. However, this essay is not centered on changing ideologies of health and sanitation or even the idea of “improvement” as Tarlow has recently described it (2007), but rather takes these municipal services as a way to explore changing ideas about American government and their resulting implicitly racialized materialities.

This account of governmentality is drawn closely from Foucault’s 1991 essay designating liberal government as a problematic and Colin Gordon’s (1991) introduction to the volume in which it appears (Burchell et al. 1991), as well as other works published alongside these. I also rely on Mitchell Dean’s text Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Dean 1999), which is an extremely useful primer and reference. Matthew Hannah’s Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (2000) influenced my approach as a ­historical study of the emergence of the U.S. Census as a tool of rational government in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this paper borrows from his framework as well. David Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick (Kazanjian 2003) also exemplifies the contradictions inherent in nineteenth-century American governmentality – particularly in racialized notions of citizenship – and provides important context for my analysis of the material politics between Annapolis and Eastport.

The concept of governmentality is one that Foucault develops in his later scholarship, as an extension of his research into personal discipline (1977) and biopower (1990: 140–144) as complementary techniques of power that are crucial to the development of capitalism. Governmentality is the natural extension and eventual conclusion of Foucault’s interest in this subject. Following Foucault (1991: 102–104), Mitchell Dean writes that:

… ‘governmentality’ marks the emergence of a distinctly new form of thinking about and exercising power in certain societies … This form of power is bound up with the discovery of a new reality, the economy, and concerned with a new object, the population. Governmentality emerges in Western European societies in the ‘early modern period’ when the art of government of the state becomes a distinct activity, and when the forms of knowledge and techniques of the human and social sciences become integral to it. (Dean 1999: 19)

Thus, the core elements marking the historical emergence of governmentality are: first, the invention and institution of political economy, which resituates the source of wealth from land to production and duplicates at a societal scale what had heretofore been conceptualized as the wealth of families governed by a patriarch; second, the discovery through social science of population and the functioning of political economy as a natural fact with measurable parameters, combined with the emergence of social statistics as the “science of the state” (Foucault 1991: 96; also see Pels 1997: 165); and third, the expansion of the apparatus of security which incorporates the institutions implicated in Foucault’s theories of discipline and biopower, but also includes the apparatus of economic regulation and fields of policy (Dean 1999: 9–39; Foucault 1991; Gordon 1991; Hannah 2000: 17–25). The “governmentalization of government” is the historical process at work; population is the object of governmental rule (Dean 1999: 19), but people are not governmentalized, governments are.

Geographer Matthew Hannah (2000) has used Foucault’s theory of governmentality to explore the connections between the U.S. Census, western territorial expansion, and American government during the second half of the nineteenth century. Hannah’s work chronicles the efforts of Francis A. Walker (1840–1897), who was superintendent over the U.S. Census in 1870 and 1880 and who, according to Hannah, “was probably the single most important early American proponent of what we would now call governmentality” (2000: 3). Walker’s work to mold the census into an instrument for scientific governance reveals the state of government in nineteenth-century America vis-à-vis Foucault’s theories. Hannah describes the tension between waning paternalism and emerging government by experts over the period of his study, ca. 1850–1900. In effect, he describes the emergence of a governmentalized federal state at the end of the nineteenth century, highlighting the census as a premier tool for envisioning the nation as a territory with a population and an economy to be administered.

Hannah’s research inspires this question: If the federal state is not markedly governmentalized before the end of the nineteenth century – Hannah’s thesis is that the national census was transformed into an instrument for liberal government through Francis A. Walker’s vision – what of state and municipal governments? When do they begin to conceive of their citizenry as a population to be administered? When do they develop the instrumentation and the tactics to carry out this project? Sewer and water infrastructure, their representations, and the discourses that surround them promise to help us to detect similar transformations at these local levels. Like the census, they are a part of the instrumentation of the state, a part of what Foucault calls the apparatus of security. This observation suggests the value of a governmentality framework for interpreting the traces of public services and utilities infrastructure that archaeologists so frequently encounter in contexts from the later nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century (cf. Barry 1996; Osborne 1996).

Governmentality has clear relevance for histories of colonialism and its importance extends into recent contexts as well, as further consequences of liberalism continue to erupt. Governmentality is one of the themes that emerges from James Ferguson’s influential study of development and its many meanings, as it was applied during one project in Lesotho in southern Africa during the 1970s and 1980s (Ferguson 1994). In that context, he concluded:

… the ‘development’ apparatus in Lesotho is not a machine for eliminating poverty that is incidentally involved with the state bureaucracy; it is a machine for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of bureaucratic state power, which incidentally takes ‘poverty’ as its point of entry – launching an intervention that may have no effect on the poverty but does in fact have other concrete effects. Such a result may be no part of the planners’ intentions – indeed, it almost never is – but resultant systems have an intelligibility of their own. (Ferguson 1994: 255–256)

The present study holds to a very similar conception of the relationship between elaboration in networked public services and the expansion and intensification of governance as an outcome.

Other scholars have been drawn to networked infrastructure as a rich point for analyzing neoliberal policies in postcolonial settings (Harris 2009; Harvey 2005; Ioris 2007; Larner and Laurie 2010; McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Sangameswaran 2009; Walker et al. 2008). In his account of the development and more recent privatization of water for drinking, irrigation, and hydroelectric power in Brazil, Antonio Ioris proposes that “Utility privatization is one of the main ordeals neoliberal globalization policies impose on countries in the global South” (Ioris 2007: 39). The present study, which registers a transformation in government in Annapolis as a shift toward classical economic liberalism, is largely anterior to the discourses of development that are the focus of anthropological research on neoliberalism. The resources and infrastructural capital being privatized under neoliberal economic policies (e.g., Harris 2009; Ioris 2007; Sangameswaran 2009) were first assembled under a somewhat different ethos, as part and parcel of liberal governance earlier in the twentieth century. What draws these instances together – programs of development, privatization, and direct colonial applications of technical apparatuses – are the techniques applied in the production of knowledge and the specific mode of statecraft that takes political economy for the object of governmental projects.

Caprotti (2007, 2008) uses the expression “internal colonialism” to describe the modernization projects of fascist Italy, specifically the creation of a series of New Towns and the frequently coerced relocation of Italian citizens to “colonize” a region of reclaimed marshland south of Rome called the Pontine Marshes, beginning in 1928 and continuing throughout the 1930s (2007: 85, 116). He writes,

The Pontine Marshes project was a deeply modern enterprise imbued with all the defining characteristics of a modern meta-project: reliance on technology and technical-scientific knowledge, a progress-based conceptualization of the project, the fetishism of technology, and the use of statistics and the ‘objective’ sciences to justify what were in reality social projects. (Caprotti 2007: 183)

The projects Caprotti describes are linked with those fascist projects that González-Ruibal approaches in Ethiopia (2008), and elsewhere designates as the failures of modernity (2006), and yet the reclamation and resettlement of the Pontine Marshes, which mobilized technologies of infrastructure, statistical knowledge, and specifically fascist discourses of planning and modernity, produced viable communities rather than ruin, albeit representing an engagement with modernity that was at times “uneasy” (Caprotti 2007: 98). Both of these perspectives remind us that social and material expressions of modernity are at all times imperfect, and these studies promote this focus as a point of entry for historical archaeological inquiry: modernity, in success and failure, is never without its surpluses of consequence and meaning and never seamless. In the Pontine Marshes project, Caprotti finds this seam large enough to climb inside; in the context of U.S. history, racial ideology and the ongoing formation of racial meanings promote the same availability to critical analysis.

While Caprotti does not follow this line of analysis, it could be said that the project to reclaim and settle the Pontine Marshes promoted or performed the governmentalization of the fascist Italian state through the exercise of techniques of government similar to those described in this chapter, especially the application of social and demographic statistics in service to authoritarian projects to manage population (Caprotti 2007: 122–126). Thus, “the regime’s planning institutions constructed urban, rural, and agricultural realities embodied in the colonists who, willing or not, came to populate this vast socio-technological experiment” (Caprotti 2007: 167).

It is difficult to parse the understanding of liberalism that is promoted by the notion of governmentality from discussions of neoliberal policies in the contemporary global economy. For Foucault, liberalism signifies a pervading governmental apparatus of knowledge and control. Neoliberalism, in contrast, references privatization of erstwhile public assets. How can these liberalisms be reconciled? For Foucault, the apparatus of security works with some subtlety, despite its tendency to broaden its every operation. It safeguards, but does not interfere in the flows of capital, in concept if not in execution. Foucault, therefore, challenges us to consider neoliberalism in historical terms, as one moment in a broader genealogy of capital and its organization.

Public Works, Patronage, and Liberal Government in Annapolis

Governmentalization in Annapolis is a long-term process and it is expressed more clearly in some areas of the city government than in others. For instance, the operation of the city’s water utility, established in 1865 (Annapolis Water Company 1867), followed Foucault’s model of liberal government very closely while over the same term of years, municipal sewers were frequently installed through the intercession of city council members as favors to their constituency, rather than being applied to improving sanitation in a systematic way. The archaeological data also show that wells and privies were still in use in Annapolis at the turn of the twentieth century, indicating redundancy with and perhaps class- and race-based access to networked sanitary systems developing since the 1860s (Palus 2009: 191–200, Appendix D).

Wells, privies, and cisterns were maintained for use in Eastport well into the twentieth century. Where only a few public wells remained in Annapolis after 1900, water was still being pumped from Eastport wells until the late 1920s and perhaps in some cases as recently as the 1960s (Palus 2009). House-to-house plans of the sewer system installed in Eastport between 1934 and 1937 show exactly how each dwelling was connected with municipal water and sewer infrastructure, and the plans also show which houses were not connected to the sanitary system at all (Fig. 12.3). Quantitative analysis of these plans clearly reveals that service broke down along lines of race and to a lesser degree along lines of class. This has bearing on the question of how Eastport was governed and eventually annexed by Annapolis. Does uneven service imply uneven governance or perhaps resistance to governance and annexation?

Fig. 12.3
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Detail of street-level plans depicting house connections with sewer and water infrastructure installed in Eastport between 1927 and 1937 (Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage Commission 1932–1937; courtesy of the City of Annapolis Department of Public Works)

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Hannah (2000) posits patronage as the historical antecedent and ongoing countertrend to governmentality. The operation of patronage as a style of government in Annapolis can be illustrated from the minutes of the meetings of the Mayor and City Council, as in the following excerpted passages from three different meetings in 1927 and 1928:

Alderman Tucker brought before the Council request of Mr. Mayer for extension of sewer in Spa View Heights to connect the new house now under construction. After some discussion Alderman Phipps made a motion which was adopted that this be referred to the Street Committee with power to act and if favorable that it advertise for bids (Annapolis 1927: 200).

Alderman Fisher stated that people living on Wagner Street could get water only after midnight and it would be impossible for a man desiring to do so, to install a heating plant on account of the water supply, the street having a supply pipe of only 1 1/2, and requested that the members of the City Council now on the water board look into this matter so that the existing condition can be remedied as soon as possible. (Annapolis 1927: 126)

Mr. Keith Worthington of Monroe Court addressed the Board and stated he was speaking not only for himself but for others living in Munroe Court saying that when it rained the water would back up in their cellars and requested that the street be paved and in his opinion this would remedy the nuisance of having water in their cellars every time it rained. This was also referred to the Street Committee. (Annapolis 1928: 196)

These passages address the state of Annapolis’ infrastructure, but more important here is the structure of these and similar requests. In contrast to this style of government, where citizens go to the City Council and ask for things often with support from one council member or another, the installation of sanitary infrastructure in Annapolis and its wider metropolitan area during the 1930s begins to reveal an entirely different epistemology of government.

There was a perceivable change in the conduct of government in the city of Annapolis as the municipal infrastructure serving the city and its suburban fringe was enlarged and elaborated. The conduct of government was by degrees disarticulated from established social networks that gave shape to the power of the city council throughout the nineteenth century. Rather than meeting face-to-face with their representatives in city council chambers, people in Annapolis contacted the city government more and more through the mediation of municipal services as, for instance, municipal water and sewers introduced new routines and embedded people within new relationships of surveillance, administration, and power. Policy, regulation, and the more impersonal operation of bureaucracy began to replace patronage as the guiding principle of government. And, there is a material trace of the ongoing “governmentalization of government” in Annapolis in the public services that were set in place during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In 1925, the city council had begun to discuss improvements to the existing water reservoir for Annapolis and its distribution network, asking “Is Annapolis ever going to be called on to furnish water to the U.S. Naval Academy, Eastport, West Annapolis, and all suburban sections? If so, when and on what terms?” (Smith 1925: 17) Plans for improvements were drawn up by 1927; later in that same year, the city council met with a representative of the State Health Department who laid out the possibilities for a metropolitan sewer and water district (Annapolis 1927: 66–67). From 1927 onward, the two efforts grew into one project, with improvements to existing water and sewer infrastructure and the extension of service to neighboring communities outside of the corporate limits of the city. The Maryland State Board of Health was instrumental in this, for instance calling together a conference that included representatives of the Annapolis city council, commissioners of the surrounding county, and members of the Annapolis Water Board to discuss the future metropolitanization of Annapolis and the relationship that these various agencies would have (Annapolis 1926: 3–4).

A plan for the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage District printed in 1931 depicts the territory that the new sewerage commission would oversee (Burwell 1931; Wolman 1926) and encloses all of the communities that were annexed by the City of Annapolis in 1951 (Fig. 12.4). Scale plans of the sewer, water, and storm drain networks were also made, with deed references, customer numbers, and the locations of individual house connections depicted for every structure that received service (Fig. 12.3 above). In addition to this, there is a photographic record of this sewer building project (Commission 1932–1937; Doyel 2008: 184) which largely seems directed at protecting sanitation authorities from liability for damage to property resulting from installation work, but also closely documented the construction of the first sewage treatment plant for the sewerage district and a pumping station located in Eastport. This extensive documentation is itself an important component of liberal government in that it produced a new visibility for this population and fixed Eastport within an administrative apparatus; when we consider the “discovery of population” in Eastport and the instrumentation of the state, this is precisely what we are talking about.

Fig. 12.4
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Overlay comparing the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage District and the 1951 annexation area, including Eastport and other adjacent communities (source: Burwell 1931; EC 1950b)

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The role of the Maryland State Board of Health in this project is central to an understanding of the “governmentalization of government” in Annapolis. In essence, this transition away from the patronage system, where sewer lines were asked for and sometimes received, was promoted by the state government. Similarly, some of the elements of liberal government were absent in Annapolis, but were present at the state level. For instance, the state health board promulgated regulations, and more importantly it conducted surveys of sanitary conditions across the state, creating a new and different visibility for sewerage as a factor in public health.

“As-built” plans of Eastport’s sewer, water, and storm drain infrastructure were produced by the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage Commission between 1932 and 1937 (Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage Commission 1932–1937), though Sanborn Company insurance maps (1930) and the above mentioned photographic record for the project indicate that municipal water was introduced to Eastport starting in 1927 and sewer lines were installed starting in 1934. These plans detail house connections to sewer and water infrastructure and show a variety of ways in which houses accommodated these new services. For instance, in many cases, sewer and water connections extend from the street, past the house, and into a small addition depicted at the rear of the structure. Other structures introduce these services directly into the front of the residence, suggestive of a different accommodation for plumbing as a new component of dwelling. Interestingly, at 11 households, the plans show sewer and water lines extending to a privy or small outbuilding at the rear of the lot, sometimes with no connections made to the dwelling at all. There are 132 homes without service, around 16% of the homes depicted on the as-built plans.

The 1930 U.S. Census introduces demographic information to this data (Census 1930). In all, 594 households were enumerated in Eastport during the 1930 census, and many households were identified by their street address. A proportion of these, equaling 244 households, could be linked across these two records.Footnote 2 Cross-tabulating data from the sewer and water plans with the race variable in the 1930 census draws out some relevant patterns in how these services, and the populations that they serviced, may have been racialized. Population is being discovered in these representations, which then become tools for governing; the services are racialized, but the population being administered is also racialized by these instruments in new ways. In this sense, networked infrastructure and its sustaining discourses are techniques of government that make manifest racial differences in the population under governance. The 244 enumerated households in the sample include 66 African–American families and 177 households coded as “white,” including a small number of European immigrants. One-third of these African–American households were not connected to municipal sewer or water. A much smaller proportion of white households were without service; eight and a half percent were not connected to city sewer, and a little more than 12% were without running water (15 and 22 households, respectively). Several plumbed privies occurred at both African–American and white-identified households.

Because infrastructure, like municipal water and sewers, define the color line so clearly, we can consider these technologies as racial materialities, as race-in-process, by looking at how municipal services were apportioned and how these services identified people more clearly to their racial types. The sanitary system as an apparatus of security becomes a part of the ongoing construction of race, even as the sanitary system emerges from the changes in how Annapolis was governed at the end of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. Furthermore, if services like municipal sewers can be described as the material culture of government, what does the relative rate of connection and disconnection signal about how communities of different races in Eastport were governed? How is the relationship between each household and the municipal infrastructure the work of agency? (cf. Ford 1994).

This last consideration becomes a central interpretive concern. If a far greater proportion of African–American households were not accessing municipal services from Annapolis, does this mark them as victims of systematic disinvestment, victims of the economic violence that constrained opportunities for African Americans after their emancipation from slavery, and promote their continuing poverty? Or can it also – not instead of – mark them as resistors to their own incorporation as a governable population, resistors to the commodification of water as a natural resource, resistors to the terms of their governance being suddenly changed, and ultimately as resistors to their annexation into the City of Annapolis?

Conclusion

In a recent commentary, Noel Castree writes, “neoliberal practices always … exist in a more-than-neoliberal context,” resulting in “unevenness in terms of process and outcome: neoliberalisations in the plural” (Castree 2006: 3). Each case in this plurality can be read as “a qualitatively distinct phenomenon in its own right: namely, an articulation between certain neoliberal policies and a raft of other social and natural phenomenon” (2006: 4). Legal implementation of racial ideology in the USA during the early twentieth century exemplifies the sorts of concerns articulating with, in this instance, the implementation of progressive reform in government that is designated by the notions of liberalism and governmentality. When the metropolitan-wide sanitation project described above is compared with earlier styles of service, real contrast reveals the advancing yet incomplete “governmentalization of the state” (Foucault 1991: 103) in this local context. This case exposes the hierarchical relationship between the city government of Annapolis and the Maryland state government emergent during the early twentieth century, in that this Depression-era sewer building program was largely prompted by action at the level of the state. Just as the City of Annapolis extended its political power to neighboring Eastport, it was itself subject to new and profuse state powers over the same period of time.

Many would anticipate that access to services will be racialized and that the extent of services provided to Eastport will be incomplete, exposing class and color lines. In the context of this research – which sees a convergence of government and public services infrastructure – lack of coverage in public services may suggest a curious gap in the governance of this community and the in-fact racialization of government. Importantly, the rate of homeownership among African Americans in Eastport is approximately equal to that of white households in the community at the time of the 1930 census, around 60%, far above what is seen historically in Annapolis and across the state (Palus 2009: 300–320; Schweninger 1990: 180). This helps us to interpret the disparity in service. African Americans in Eastport wielded substantial economic power. Rather than representing a neglected population, the void may just as well indicate an exit from the multiform tactics of governance that are implied by service. Interpretation of the racialization of utilities and the partiality of the program of governing become some of the most crucial elements of this history. This creates the opportunity to take apart the elements of rational government as Foucault and others have portrayed it and reimagine aspects of Eastport’s social history according to that model.

This new materiality, inextricably linked with government, is predicated on social control through exhaustive knowledge of population, which is produced by the wider infrastructure that becomes a sort of machine for rendering population visible and regularizing behaviors. However, this apparatus is in places blind, which is partly a consequence of race. In that there are racial differences, utility lines retrace the color line and intensify the meaning of racial identifications. I propose that racial differences embedded in certain public services in Eastport can yield an account of African–American agency, resistance, and ultimately the achievement of a measure of autonomy and self-determination, rather than yielding only an account of structural, race-based disenfranchisement. Disconnection suggests the agentive capacity to push away from governance and defend the limited sovereignty that suburban settlement presented to African Americans prior to this intensification of government, this deployment of new and elaborate apparatuses, and this burgeoning imperative to govern.

The emergence of that imperative is marked here most conspicuously by the new instrumentation providing for economic security. Infrastructure for water and sanitary sewers were only a portion of the overall networked infrastructure put in place in Annapolis during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in other contexts for urban modernization. The locus for technical modernization is not only where archaeologists find it with the abandonment of much of the infrastructure for the earlier nineteenth century, exemplified here in the archaeological features comprising filled wells and privies. It manifests as well in the discourses of government, in the representations of population that guided development, and in the very corpus of historical records that make historical archaeology distinctly compelling but also challenging. That base of knowledge is enabled by an apparatus that is contiguous with the physical infrastructure and also more distantly contiguous with the techniques and discourses of colonial administration.