Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks by Simone M. Müller (review)

This book starts with an impressive description of the euphoria felt on both sides of the Atlantic in 1858 after they were connected by a telegraph cable. To illustrate this, Müller reproduces a brilliant lithograph, "American Torchlight Procession Around the World," made to celebrate the jubilant mood of the occasion. It shows a group of people, representing all the peoples of the world, holding telegraph wires girdling the globe. This lithograph also serves Müller well in stressing the "global" implications of the new technology. Although it failed after transmitting a few dozen messages between London and New York, this first Atlantic cable showed, nevertheless, that long distance submarine telegraphy was possible.

Then, after this euphoria, as with the Atlantic cable enterprise, Müller's writing becomes more challenging: the reader must grapple with academic jargon. "Global connectivity," "globality," "coloniality," "alternative modernity," "news modernity," "transnational," "discursive hegemony," "subaltern studies," "methodological nationalism," "dematerialized information flows," "unified market of morality," and "transboundary logic of submarine telegraphy" are examples. These are presented as if they are abracadabra, opening doors to greater insights. This keenness for jargon obscures what this book is about.

A second difficulty arises from the work being originally a dissertation and still in want of refinement as a book. That is, it displays several characteristics of an academic dissertation, such as pretentious language and too many and poorly integrated details. These problems make reading this book, well researched though it clearly is, challenging if not downright frustrating.

Müller's central assertion is that submarine telegraphy was the "historical force of globalization." Her interest in submarine telegraphy is not in its technology, but how it brought about "globalization." She focuses on what she calls "the class of 1866," about forty people whose effort made the Atlantic cable of that year finally successful. They were "the actors of globalization," and "the dominant mover of the cable business" until about 1914, when Müller asserts that the advent of the wireless ended the communication monopoly of the cable companies. They included John Pender, James Anderson, Cyrus Field, Charles Bright, Thomas Brassey, William Thomson, and Samuel F. B. Morse. Probably Müller is aware that Morse's (and some others') involvement in the Atlantic cable enterprise was only symbolic. She indicates that this book is a study of them. Yet this is not a prosopography or any detailed examination of them. She describes them as an "exclusive club" of "white, male, and from the middle class," but not from the landed gentry, who "formed a close cable community."

Müller then describes how these people in 1871 helped form the Society of Telegraph Engineers as "a cosmopolitan institute." In this, William Siemens played a special role, particularly through his effort to keep the membership as wide and diverse as possible. This emphasis reflected the fact that submarine telegraphy was itself "cosmopolitan" or a "transnational science," she argues.

A good part of the book is Müller's story of Siemens's effort to break the Anglo-American monopoly in submarine telegraphy. So is her account of the competition and struggle over telegram tariffs. She stresses the ability of "cable managers" to respond to conflicts and wars. For example, when international relations turned more nationalistic after the Spanish-American War in 1898, "cable agents" adopted "strategic nationalism" but without changing their business practices.

By telegraphy she means submarine telegraphy, and by that primarily the Atlantic cables. Müller focuses on submarine telegraphy because she asserts that cables were mostly private enterprises, so their "operators were thinking and acting beyond the nation-state," while landlines were owned and controlled by governments. Cables, then, were instruments of "globalization" more than landlines were. This assertion may need more evidence. Not all landlines were government-operated. All U.S. lines, for example, were privately owned and operated. It is true that imperial governments, [End Page...