Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks by Simone M. Müller (review)

Simone Müller’s book grapples with important questions: How ought we to study the history of globalization? Why choose a particular technological infrastructure as the object of study? Müller chose the global cable telegraph network because “wiring the world was essential for globalization processes” (p. 229) since it “dematerialized information flows” (p. 119). She also spends some space examining the business of cable telegraphy because “submarine telegraphy was foremost a commercial undertaking” (p. 50). The construction, laying, and operation of the global telegraph network was a technological undertaking and business enterprise of supreme importance during the last third of the nineteenth century. It attracted the scientific and engineering talents and the capital of a generation of electricians and entrepreneurs. And it was one of the most important infrastructures that made globalization and modernity possible.

At first glance, Müller’s book would seem to be about this story. The dust jacket features a key piece of cable telegraph technology—Sir William Thomson’s siphon recorder. The title of her book is rendered in stylized Morse code, with dots and dashes worked into the letters. Yet her book is not about the technology of cable telegraphy or the business of running the industry. She contends that previous scholarship has already covered the building out of the global telegraph network from the perspectives of technology, capitalism, and imperialism. Her contribution is to examine this history by studying the men who were the “actors of globalization.” This approach allows her to connect “macro-structural processes of imperialism and capitalist expansion with micro-structural processes of transfer and translation with regard to global communication.” She uses this perspective to argue that “social and cultural considerations … played an equally important role” as technology, capitalism, and imperialism in understanding the “wiring of the world and ultimately globalization processes” (p. 228).

As a historian of technology and capitalism, I take issue with this contention. For me, the perspectives of technology, capitalism, and imperialism are the most important ways to understand the development of the global telegraph network. Professional and social relationships and cultural outlooks of key actors were certainly important, but the wiring of the world was an undertaking that relied on the development of major technological innovations, the amassing of large pools of capital, and the desire of Western governments to dominate Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

However, as Müller notes, much of this work has already been done. It is fair to ask what contributions her approach makes to our understanding of the cable telegraph network and its facilitation of globalization. She begins with a group of about forty men whom she calls the “Class of 1866,” the men who laid and operated the first working transatlantic cable. Some members of this class were financiers and managers, like cable executive John Pender and investor Cyrus Field. Others staffed remote and desolate cable stations, like Ezra Weedon, head of the Hearts Content, Newfoundland, station. These men, she notes, were middle-class strivers, not sons of the landed aristocracy. Müller claims that this close-knit group dominated the engineering and management of the cable industry until (and even beyond) their deaths.

The Class of 1866, for example, helped form the first professional society of electrical engineers, the Society of Telegraph Engineers, in 1871. Despite this common professional identity, conflicts arose. Engineers who manufactured cable instruments, especially duplex sets that allowed for the simultaneous transmission of two messages, did not understand the actual operating conditions experienced by station managers and operators. Remote cable stations became places where engineering theory and practice—design and use—collided. Disagreements also arose between the engineers and operators of cable stations on the same line, especially Hearts Content, Newfoundland, and Valentia, Ireland.

Another contribution Müller makes is to distinguish between who was inside and outside the network of cable telegraphy. Because of the...