Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903 by John A. Britton (review)

Historical writing on the landline telegraph and undersea cable has in recent years expanded its ambit beyond invention and network building to probe the influence of electrical communications on public life. Two essay collections—Bernard Finn and Daqing Yang, eds., Communication under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications (2009), and M. Michaela Hampf and Simone Müller-Pohl, eds., Global Communication Electric (2014)—are emblematic of this trend. So, too, is John A. Britton’s Cables, Crises, and the Press.

Like many historians, Britton began with a deceptively simple question: How did a particular Latin American journalist send his news reports in 1928? To answer, Britton wrote historian of technology Daniel R. Headrick for advice. Headrick sent Britton to the Cable & Wireless Archive in Porthcurno in Cornwall, setting Britton on a journey that would culminate with the publication of this book.

Britton originally intended his “main theme” to be the involvement of Latin American governments, political movements, and activists in the “global communications system” that the telegraph and cable helped to create (p. viii). Once he began to explore the business, technological, and journalistic dimensions of the new medium, however, he shifted his focus from Latin America to the United States. Cables, Crises, and the Press analyzes in a “holistic” way the new “information system” created by the telegraph and cable and the messages they conveyed (p. 7), with a focus on headline events such as the Venezuela boundary crisis of 1895 and the Spanish-American War.

The consequences of the new information system for public life often were unfortunate. Diplomats long resisted the affordances of the telegraph and cable in the conviction that instantaneous communications promoted overhasty decisions, a conclusion that echoes one of the main findings of David Paul Nickles’s Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (2003). Not until diplomats were goaded by journalists, who had been much quicker to rely on telegraphically transmitted news dispatches, would they adapt, limiting their ability to defuse conflict through delay. The relationship of the new information system and popular culture was equally fraught. The “interface” between the telegraph, the cable, and the press fostered “outbursts of belligerent patriotism” that “cast an ominous cloud over the geopolitical environment” (pp. xii–xiii).

Britton’s approach is chronological. Following two chapters on the establishment of the new international information system, he analyzes, in turn, the role of communications in U.S. international relations in Argentina, Chile, Central America, Chile (again), Venezuela, Cuba, and Panama. The first international crises in which telegraphic news coverage loomed large almost led to a naval war between the United States and Chile in 1891–92 (one of Britton’s best chapters), while the intensity of the newspaper coverage of the Venezuelan border controversy of 1895–96—in retrospect, largely a “media event” (p. 5)—surprised leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.

A centerpiece of Britton’s analysis is the role of the new information system in the Spanish-American War. In recent year, revisionist historians of journalism have challenged the historical commonplace that, in a cynical ploy to sell newspapers, an irresponsible “yellow press” spearheaded by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World whipped up war fervor in 1898, forcing the United States into an unnecessary war with Spain. Britton is unconvinced. Echoing the older consensus, he concludes that a “revolution in international reporting” (p. 7) did in fact take place in the1890s and that this revolution would indeed have baleful consequences for the United States and the world. Irresponsible newspaper editors did not cause President William McKinley to declare war, Britton concedes, in a sop to the revisionists, yet the press played an “essential role” in elevating the issue (p. 223), and the information system was “integral...