The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century (review)

Jill Hills has written an important book for historians of communications and international relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her main focus is the competition between American and British governments and corporations in international communications, from British control of the first international telegraph cables in the 1850s, to American domination after World War II. She considers the economic and geopolitical significance of ocean cable telegraph routes from the 1850s to World War I, the development of point-to-point radio within national and international regulatory and competitive contexts, and the competition between the United States and the United Kingdom for cultural dominance of South American mass media between the world wars.

Her book has several strengths. Most important, she does an excellent job of explaining the relationships between corporate strategy, national policy, and international regulation, three areas historians have typically examined separately. Building on the work of theorists like Stephen Krasner and Susan Strange, Hills "shows that international regimes have not been stand-alone entities but part of the armory of mechanisms, including domestic regulation, tariff barriers, and bilateral agreements, that states used to delineate markets and to protect their own economies. . . . Overall, international institutions have formed the meeting place and mediating structure between domestic politics, national markets, and international markets" (pp. 8-9).

Hills also excels at describing Anglo-American competition in East Asia and South America. China, Siberia, and Japan had held the attention of American commercial interests since the 1790s, and the region became particularly important as an alternative route to Europe in the wake of the failure of the 1858 Atlantic cable. Yet the British managed to block American entry into this region until the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the United States found its military campaign in the Far East in the Spanish-American War of 1898 hampered by the lack of American-controlled cables to the Philippines. In South America as well, Britain exploited its cable landing concessions to prevent American companies from establishing cable routes to that region. Control over the South American cable routes helped the British to maintain economic influence over the region until World War I. American economic and cultural influence superseded the British between the world wars, as a result of control over Latin American telephone networks and mass media, especially film and broadcast radio.

While Hills' account is clearly written and solidly researched, it does have some shortcomings from the perspective of a specialist. Most important, she does not draw sufficient distinction between message communications networks (telegraphy, telephony, and radiotelegraphy) and mass media (news services, broadcast radio, and film). These two systems operated in very different economic and political contexts; the communications networks were vital to business and government operations, whereas the mass media affected a nation's culture. I would have liked Hills to explore more fully the differences between these types of networks, and how these differences shaped the ways in which nations and international regulatory bodies influenced them.

Also, her research base mainly consists of printed primary and secondary sources and does not include some relevant recent scholarship. An expansion of that research base, particularly on the American side, would have given her account more depth and context. Although it is understandably difficult to conduct archival research across an ocean, she likely could have obtained printed U.S. government documents like Congressional hearings and Federal Communications Commission reports. Such sources would have improved her discussion of issues like cable landing licenses and the regulation of the domestic and overseas telegraph industries. Furthermore, she does not engage with Peter Hugill's Global Communications since 1844 (1999), which covers much of the same ground, nor does she notice important work by Richard John on the political context of American telecommunications. In short, the addition of American government documents and recent scholarship...