Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830 (review)

Readers should note that the title of this book is seriously misleading. It is not about telegraphic imperialism “c. 1830” (for there were no telegraphs in India at the time), but from the 1830s to the First World War, and even beyond.

That said, the book offers some valuable new information about telegraphy in India, though it has some unfortunate weaknesses. Where the book excels is in the development and impact of the telegraph within India. The first chapter analyzes the contribution of William O’Shaughnessy as the innovator who brought telegraphy to India before the uprising of 1857 and finds his work wanting. Several of O’Shaughnessy’s innovations—using iron rods instead of the more expensive copper wire, foregoing insulators as unnecessary, and laying the lines in a straight line between major cities rather than along roads and through smaller towns—proved unworkable and had to be replaced by imported technological solutions.

The chapter on the telegraph during the uprising is equally valuable, for it debunks the myth that the telegraph “saved India” for Britain. Instead, Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury shows how vulnerable the network was to the destruction of lines and the killing of employees, how inadequate was the coverage, and how it failed the British at several key moments. Another important contribution is the book’s discussion of personnel matters. During the 1857–58 uprising, the British learned the value of information, both official dispatches by telegraph and mail and rumors and hearsay from informants. At the same time, they realized that much official and confidential information was being leaked. After quelling the uprising, they began to distrust Indian employees of the telegraph service and replaced the signalers with Europeans, leaving only lower-level positions to Indians. This situation came to a head in 1907, when telegraph employees went on strike to demand better wages and working conditions. By disrupting and slowing down the transmission of telegrams rather than shutting down the system completely, the employees were able to organize and communicate with each other across the breadth of British India, from Rangoon to Pesh-awar. While it represented a united labor action, the strike also revealed the deep schism between the two groups and the different responses they elicited from the government, with the European signalers achieving some of their goals while many Indians strikers were summarily fired.

In the process of describing and analyzing these historical events, Lahiri Choudhury also proposes a hypothesis about information and politics that might be called a double-edged sword. The British who ruled India saw the telegraph as a means of acquiring and sharing information, thereby enhancing their control over the Raj. This hope eluded them, however, because the telegraph and, by extension, the press were used by their opponents, whether labor organizers or nationalists, to undermine British rule.

Where the book really fails is in its understanding of the larger role of telecommunications in the British Empire and in international relations. This is not for lack of research, for the author cites original documents from archives in India and the United Kingdom, as well as speeches given at banquets celebrating the inauguration of new cables, the memoirs and accounts of participants, and other primary sources. As for secondary sources, he cites several celebratory company-sponsored publications. Unfortunately he neglected the classic scholarly works on the subject: Hal-ford Hoskins’s British Routes to India (1928), this reviewer’s The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunication and International Relations, 1851–1945 (1991), Peter Hugill’s Global Communications since 1844 (1999), and Dwayne Win-seck and Robert Pike’s Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (2007). Without knowledge of the work of earlier scholars to help make sense of the evolution of international telegraphy, these chapters are a hodgepodge of anecdotes and quotations, with a narrative that jumps back and forth in time between the 1830s and the 1930s, leaving the reader confused and bewildered...