The European Cable Companies in South America before the First World War (review)

Starting with the Ireland-to-Newfoundland cable of 1858, telegraphic communication between Europe and North America excited great hope and enthusiasm as one of the triumphs of the age. It subsequently generated a considerable body of literature, and continues to inspire scholarly debate today. In contrast, European telegraphic communication with South America, begun with a cable between Portugal and Brazil in 1874, produced comparatively little interest, and the subject has remained largely untouched by scholars.

Jorma Ahvenainen now seeks to rectify this deficiency with the latest of his works on the world's telegraphs, the earlier ones being The Far Eastern Telegraphs (1981) and The History of the Caribbean Telegraphs before the First World War (1996). The title immediately gives rise to the hope that this book will fill the serious gap in our knowledge of European telegraphic enterprises in a large part of the globe. Before turning too many pages, however, a reader begins to lose that hope and ends up plodding through masses of detail without any central thread.

The book opens in the late 1850s with a long chronicle of early schemes for laying a cable between Europe and South America. These involved many nations, chief among them Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Brazil. Concessions and privileges were granted, sold, and resold, but it was not until the early 1870s that private cable companies, mostly British-owned or -financed, sought to undertake actual work. In 1874, the Brazilian Submarine Company linked Lisbon with Pernambuco in Brazil via Madeira and Cape Verde. A landline between Buenos Aires and Valparaiso in central Chile had connected the two coasts since 1872, and by 1876 the Western and Brazilian and other smaller British-led companies had laid cables along the South American coasts, linking all major towns. Ahvenainen highlights the difficulties initially encountered in the maintenance of coastal cables. Easily damaged by coral reefs and ships' anchors, cables designed for the deep ocean proved unsuitable for shallow waters. Cable companies first collaborated in overcoming logistical problems and in extending service, then finally merged in 1899 to form the Western Telegraph Company.

Ahvenainen's book is largely a compilation of business records and diplomatic correspondence laboriously collected in a dozen countries. Concessions, contracts, decrees, agreements, telegraph tariffs and rates, balance sheets, stock prices, minutes of board meetings, and reports of revenues, misuse of funds, and bankruptcies—all are reproduced or paraphrased. But Ahvenainen leaves it to the reader to make sense of them and decide what they mean. Deepening the monotony is the exclusion of any personal accounts, letters, or memoirs of those involved in or affected by oceanic cable telegraphy.

In the last and most interesting chapters, Ahvenainen attempts to probe the politics of cable enterprise. He describes the persistent efforts by firms in Germany, France, and the United States to gain a hold on the South American cable system. As early as 1882, the American promoter James A. Scrymser financed a cable from Galveston to Lima via Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador, and began to expand its reach on the west coast. Still, the near monopoly of the Western Telegraph Company in the region did not end until 1913, when Brazil refused to extend its privileges. It is unfortunate that Ahvenainen does not draw on his other works to offer comparisons, and yet one observation he makes here does hold true generally: German and French companies were often funded and hence controlled by their governments, whereas British and American companies were not, and this very likely accounts for their greater degree of success.

Ahvenainen makes no effort to engage scholarly studies. His only such reference, to Daniel Headrick's The Invisible Weapon (1991), pertains to a trivial detail. An even more serious shortcoming is the failure to address the social, economic, and cultural effects of the submarine telegraph in South America and how it changed South American relations...