Communications under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications (review)

Many people who frequent the internet are only dimly aware that the electric precursor of this communications network dates back over a century and a half. The deployment of thousands of miles of insulated copper wire on the ocean floor established the basis for the first phase in the globalization of modern communications. The central theme of this nicely edited volume seems fairly simple at first glance. After some false starts in the 1850s, entrepreneurs and engineers found the right combination of iron wire rope for strength, gutta percha for insulation, and a copper core for relaying electrical impulses. By the early 1900s telegraph messages moved from continent to continent in a matter of minutes.

The ten contributors to Communications under the Seas make clear, however, that there were several levels of complexity in the building and operation of this network. Profit-seeking companies had to deal with the shifting policies of the governments involved. Robert Boyce's essay examines the twists and turns that led to the creation of Britain's powerful Cable and Wireless company in 1929. There was a paradox here. The negotiations to enhance imperial unity via electric communications revealed deep fissures within the British Empire. Kurt Jacobsen studies the remarkable story of Denmark's Great Northern Telegraph Company (linking Europe and East Asia), which managed to survive the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Imperial Japan until the onset of World War II. By contrast, the French and Japanese tended to have more government involvement in their cables. Pascal Griset details the place of cable in French–U.S. relations. While allies in the broader sense, Paris and Washington found much to cause disputes—wartime censorship and the French government's response to the surge of private U.S. cable companies in the 1920s. Daqing Yang's research indicates that the Meiji government at first relied on the Danish Great Northern, but, after Japan's victory over China in 1895, the government established its own cables for Taiwan and other parts of its expanding empire. Japan's ambitious plans for an East Asian network were never realized because of World War II.

In spite of the brevity of this volume, it does a commendable job in explaining the technical foundation of the cable network. Coeditor Bernard Finn examines the fortuitous confluence of key innovations in the nineteenth century. Progress in telegraphy combined with the discovery of a natural insulator (gutta percha) and the development of large, steam-powered ships that could carry the massive amounts of cable for transoceanic deployment. Jonathan Winkler documents the resilience of cables in the face of competition from radio telegraphy in the early twentieth century—largely the result of the security of point-to-point wired connections. Jeff Hecht's insightful essay explains how cables enjoyed a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of the fiber-optic system that made possible the internet.

Four of these contributions offer the general reader succinct overviews of long-term trends. Jorma Ahvenainen surveys the history of the International Telegraph Union, the organization that established the necessary ground rules for themovement of telegraphmessages across national boundaries. David Nickles explores the challenges of the increased speed wrought by cable communications on the tradition-prone work of diplomats and finds evidence of increased anxiety, suspicion, and error. Daniel Headrick and Peter Hugill place the history of submarine cables in the context of the emergence of the modern nation-state. Headrick's synthesis of cable use in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II provides insights into the role of communications in geopolitical strategy, while Hugill explains how industrialization, militarism, and the mass press made communications a central factor in world history and concludes with projections concerning global power structure in the early twenty-first century.

These essays tend to focus on Europe, Asia, and North America. In terms of the evolution of...