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Reviewed by:
  • Telecommunications and Empire
  • Hugh R. Slotten (bio)
Telecommunications and Empire. By Jill Hills. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pp. xii+291. $45.

Jill Hills has written an important book for scholars interested in long-term global trends in telecommunications and international relations. Her previous book, The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century (2002), focused on developments from the mid-nineteenth century until World War II. Her new book begins where this one ended, focusing on efforts by the United States to dominate international telecommunications from the end of the war until the 1997 World Trade Organization Agreement. She argues that the United States, as the “world’s dominant economic and military power, attempted to restructure the international market of telecommunications to expand its direct and indirect control over the domestic markets of other governments. At the same time, it protected its domestic market from foreign penetrations” (p. 2). Central to this “U.S. Empire project” was the nation’s attempt to “create a world in its own market image” (p. 26).

Historians will appreciate Hills’s emphasis on the contingent nature of historical development. A central concern is to show that the current structure of international communications resulted from specific historical decisions and processes. Instead of simply adopting a top-down model to explain U.S. actions, she explores the complex forces that have driven government policy. The drive to “create a world in its own market image” was mediated by conflicting social and economic interests, especially among competing government agencies as well as national and international corporations. Hills focuses on the competing forces driving U.S. efforts to control key intergovernmental institutions involved in the regulation of telecommunications, including the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). She does an especially good job of demonstrating that there often has not been a clear separation between U.S. domestic policy and international policy. For example, the dominant independent regulatory agency in charge of domestic policy for all forms of electronic communications, the Federal Communications Commission, has made decisions regulating international [End Page 725] markets based partly on domestic considerations. Rather than portray the U.S. push for liberalization as an inevitable and monolithic process, Hills stresses that the “Empire project” has only been partially successful.

Historians of technology interested in deep contextual analysis of particular historical periods will likely take issue with Hills. For example, she does not fully explore the cold war context of international institutions such as Intelsat. Her focus on the drive to expand markets means that other motivations are not sufficiently explored. The establishment of Intelsat, the first global satellite communication system, needs to be seen in the context of the space race with the Soviet Union. Both the United States and the USSR sought to exploit spectacular achievements in space exploration to demonstrate the superiority of their respective economic and political systems. They were especially interested in using achievements in space to win over hearts and minds in less-developed countries. The mixed motives that drove technology during the cold war could have been dealt with in a more complete manner.

Because Hills is not primarily interested in a deep analysis of a particular historical period, her use of archival sources is by no means exhaustive. Overall, the book’s main strength is the way it connects U.S. attempts since the 1970s to introduce the liberalization of communications around the world to earlier historical developments. Historians of technology particularly interested in the role of the ITU and the WTO in recent developments in telecommunications will be especially appreciative.

Hugh R. Slotten

Dr. Slotten is senior lecturer in the Department of Media, Film, and Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

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