Railroaded, by Richard white

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)

The development of the Transcontinental Railroad during the 19th century was one of the largest technological infrastructure projects in human history. It remade the continent, created new monopolies, captured government and institutions, and carries deep echoes with contemporary Big Tech. It is also unsentimental about how much of it was simply incompetent, which is a useful corrective to any account, mine included, that makes institutional capture sound like a plan.

Read it asking: Which parts of the railroad story are about technology, and which are about a state that had not yet decided what it wanted to be?