From bridges and roads to data networks: Why everything must flow in modern times - a global history of infrastructures. They are the lifelines of our civilization: data highways, power supply, canals, and satellites. In a comprehensive overview, historian Dirk van Laak elegantly and richly illustrates how these networks, known as infrastructure, have transformed the world and daily life over the past 200 years. Without them, neither the modern household nor TV, internet, and smartphones, nor colonialism or globalization would have been possible. Yet whether it's water, goods, or traffic: everything must flow, or nothing works at all. From the very beginning, infrastructures have been continuously expanded - the motto has always been more and faster, and this remains true today. Dirk van Laak not only shows how central these structures, often below our threshold of perception, are today.