Finishing up chapter one here and I'm stuck on her choice of going for the broad, overarching themes before (presumably) diving into specific examples. I'm sure it'll be the best choice by the end of it, but at this point it's a bit hard for me to follow her in depth dissection of British Empire/pre-British Empire abuses of power without something to latch them onto (though she does bring up the Morant Bay rebellion to give some examples, but the overall chapter is very all-encompassing). It just makes it a bit of a long start up for an extremely long book (all this feels like an overly long introduction especially with it focusing on the very early British Empire.

I also wished she had, if she's spending so much time on it, properly defined British Empire Liberalism. She brings up British thinkers, politicians, and authors and how they struggled to combine the violent news from the colonies with their idea of British Liberalism, but (as far as I can tell) she never took the time to give even a few of the key beliefs of it (though, it is such a large and contradictory political system that I imagine it would be hard to distill it down).

I'll continue for now but I'm realizing that multiple shorter books on various specific British occupied colonies might be more so what I'm looking for than this book, at least at the moment.

I dunno, I guess I was expecting this book to be more on the lines of how physical factory systems and equipment was slotted into the planning/execution of Disneyland and less of this philosophical the guest going through the dark ride occupies a position closer to the artisan than the modern (1950s) factory worker because they see the completed outcome of their work following the whole process (riding and getting off the dark ride) instead of just a single point on the assembly ride. I still think he's got some interesting things to say but it's not what I went into this book expecting at all 😕.

Edit: okay right after I posted this he went into more of the engineering aspects of the dark rides, nice. I should clarify that there is a good amount of talk about the engineering and mechanical side of things and beyond (I really liked the section where he discussed how Disneyland's initial feasibility planning was done similarly to how new industrial factories are planned), but there is also a good amount of the philosophizing parts. I don't hate them but I think I'd rather just have a shorter book without them instead.