Entreprise, technologie et souverainete: Les telecommunications transatlantiques de la France, XIXe-XXe siecles (review)

This is the first major work describing the telecommunications links between France and the Americas, especially the United States. But it is much more than that. It is a complex analysis of three interlocking sets of relationships: the relations between business and the state in France and the United States; the relations between these countries and between them and the rest of the world, especially Britain and Latin America; and the interactions between business, domestic politics, international politics, and new technologies. In short, it is a work of breathtaking ambition. How well does Pascal Griset succeed?

The book is divided into three sections defined by their “strategic paradigm,” in which technology, capital, and geopolitical ambitions develop symbiotically. The first, titled “Rule Britannia,” covers the years roughly 1866–1911, in which British hegemony rested on possession of most of the world’s submarine cables. Then comes “Mutations” (1911–29), in which the British hegemony is overthrown by the appearance of powerful American cable companies and by radiotelegraphy in both the United States and France; this is the most complex and original part of the book. The third period Griset calls the “Pax Americana,” increasingly dominated by American telecommunications and media corporations.

The great strength of this book is its contribution to French business history. It is the first thorough analysis of the French telegraph, cable, and radio industries, solidly founded on archival research. It was published as part of a series sponsored by the Institut d’histoire de l’industrie, a branch of the Ministry of Industry. The doctoral dissertation on which the book is based was awarded the Prix d’histoire industrielle for 1995.

The book is also a fine contribution to the history of American businesses, including Western Union, Commercial Cable, Radio Corporation of America (RCA), American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T), and other companies, based on documents in the National Archives, the David Sarnoff Research Center, the National Museum of American History, and the AT&T Archives. Here the author makes clear his admiration (and envy) of the success of American business. Although this aspect, which occupies almost half the book, does not contain any surprises to readers familiar with American business history, it does present an international dimension often neglected by Americanists.

The study of these two worlds of business permits the author to analyze their very different relations with their respective governments. The U.S. government established the basic rules, such as antitrust laws or the allocation of radio frequencies. Only in times of war or crisis did it intervene actively, as in 1919, when the U.S. Navy, thwarted in its ambition to control the international radio communications of the United States, created RCA. Otherwise, corporations were free to litigate smaller rivals to death, practice dumping, form cartels, and use any strong-arm tactic they could get away with to grow to stupendous size and spread American values in the process.

France, too, had brilliant engineers, enterprising businesspeople, and plentiful capital. Yet in the cable business, the Compagnie française des câbles télégraphiques was hard-pressed to maintain even a tiny presence in the North Atlantic (at their peak, French cables carried 5 percent of the traffic). Radio-France fared better from 1919 to 1932, then shrank during the Depression and collapsed in World War II. Part of the problem was the Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones, which acted as both arbiter and competitor to private firms, constantly meddling, controlling, and procrastinating. But the cause went deeper: “More than the incapacity of the administration or a lack of dynamism among entrepreneurs, it is the incapacity of the social body to establish a dialogue between these two worlds that appears as one of the main factors explaining the sometimes disappointing performances of France” (p. 595).

Although the book is a...