Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (review)

Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike present a wide-ranging study of communications technologies, global media, and the growth of international cable and wireless telecommunications providers in Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930. Over the course of ten chapters, Winseck, a professor of media studies at Carleton College, and Pike, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen's University, uncover the complex origins of the international telecommunications industry in the mid-nineteenth century, and explore its growing influence over commerce, information flow, and international development in the early twentieth century. More significantly, the authors draw attention to the connections between the international communications industry and Western political and economic imperialism.

One of Winseck and Pike's primary goals is to raise scholarly awareness of the inherent political, social, and economic connections between network firms, such as Britain's Eastern Telegraph Company, and content providers like Reuters and the Associated Press. News agencies proved to be stable customers for international telegraph services, and the two industries shared common investors and senior officials. However, news services organized business cartels and invested in upstart communications companies to put pressure on the dominant telegraph firms to lower prices and improve service. When Marconi pioneered wireless broadcasting in the early twentieth century, international news services were some of his earliest investors. Thus, the authors show that global media played a substantial role in shaping international communications networks.

The authors highlight the fact that both network and content industries operated in a political climate dominated by asymmetrical state regulation. Strong nations such as England, France, and to a lesser extent, the United States, exercised great control over international communications and news transmission. These nations tightly regulated which firms could land cables on their shorelines and imposed restrictions on connections between international and domestic telegraph networks. Cable firms faced fewer regulations in developing nations in Central and South America. In these regions, European and American firms pressured post-colonial governments for exclusive landing rights and dominated domestic and international news and message services. Throughout Africa and Asia, telegraph firms brazenly flaunted their power as colonial agents. In 1870, the Great Northern Company simply ignored the dictates of the imperial Chinese government and smuggled cables ashore to provide covert news and communications services to Europeans living in Shanghai (116).

Winseck and Pike downplay the role of imperial rivalries in shaping the development of international cable systems. The authors show that cable and media companies had become large, multinational firms by the beginning of the twentieth century. Firms founded by investors in rival European nations often carved out "spheres of influence" in lucrative markets rather than engaging in ruinous competition. Similarly, colonial powers expressed few concerns about using telegraph lines belonging to foreign companies for diplomatic and military communications. Germany utilized cables belonging to French and British firms for government messages to Africa and South America until its adversaries cut access to these lines at the beginning of the First World War (242).

The strength of Communication and Empire lies in its analysis of how governments used international communications systems to further specific diplomatic agendas. In the final chapters, Winseck and Pike offer an intriguing depiction of how Woodrow Wilson used the "free flow of information" doctrine to further his vision of liberal internationalism following the First World War. At the same time Wilson was promoting liberal postwar information policies, the American government shrewdly controlled the flow of news and information to American dollar dependencies in Central American and the Caribbean in order to maintain US political and economic domination. That the ends seemingly justified the means offered validation for these conflicting communications ideologies in the eyes of American policy makers.

Winseck and Pike's work complements studies of international communications such as Daniel Headrick's The Invisible Weapon, 1991 and Jill Hills' The Struggle for Control of Global Communications...