I've started worrying that maybe I've been doing this all wrong.

In telling these new histories of Old Texas, I worry that I've been focusing too much on individuals.

Individuals can move history, no doubt, but just as often, I've come to believe, they ride historical waves rather than make them.

Every now and then, however, some invention, some innovation, or just some change in how technology

is used comes along and moves history forward with a momentum of its own, subtler, perhaps,

but far more powerful than any political ideology.

Take, for example, cotton.

The unprecedented profitability of cotton raising reshaped the economic loyalties of Texas, forever associated land with wealth in Texan's minds,

and required a series of political and moral compromises around slavery that would have violent and long-lasting consequences

here. Or take the railroad. The railroad annihilated the disadvantages of distance which had kept

Texas' economy colonial and set the state on a different trajectory than the rest of the

stubbornly agrarian American South. What about air conditioning?

Can you really imagine 30 million people living in Texas today without it?

These innovations became true engines of history.

The most transformative engines of history, however, tend to cover their own tracks.

Living in an age of integrated circuits

and cheap air travel means we can't hardly imagine life before it, which means we also can't

see how the genius of the integrated circuit owes an intellectual debt to Comanche Pemmican, or

how Southwest Airlines might owe its success to a regulatory model developed around the Spanish

flood irrigation systems of El Paso and San Antonio.

Engines like these concentrate resources behind them and focus the human mind in front of them

like nothing else. And so they change how people see the world. The domestication of the horse may have been what created the cantankerous, individualistic political culture of the Lipan Apaches, and then the Comanches, and then Techanos, and then Anglo-Texans.

...