Book review: The Contractors

In 2011 Hugh Ferguson and Mike Chrimes published The Civil Engineers. Their latest book, The Contractors, is a companion volume, in that it has the same landscape format and the same internal layout. It is a worthy companion to their earlier book. The Contractors relates the activities of British and Irish contractors over a period of some 300 years. The authors have written the book from two viewpoints.

First, they take the reader through the various ‘eras’ of civil engineering construction in six separate chapters: early contractors before the eighteenth century; the canal age; the railway age; the...