Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (review)

Communication and Empire presents a richly detailed picture of the early history of global electronic communications networks. In a break from previous narratives, Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike argue that, before World War I, the development of international communications networks (primarily telegraph and radio, in this account) was marked by cooperation and interdependence rather than nationalistic or imperial competition. Western communications companies operated across national borders, cooperating and competing primarily according to their own business interests, not the national interests of the countries in which they were based. Although this cooperation broke down in the run-up to World War I, when national security concerns took on amore dominant role in shaping worldwide communications systems, it is a mistake to project these concerns back into the period before the war.

Winseck and Pike’s account is not a history of technology per se; there is virtually no discussion of the technical workings or the invention of telegraphy, telephony, or radio. Furthermore, the authors only rarely discuss the lived experiences of communications technologies. Two images, of American women sending a telegram and making a phone call at the beginning of the twentieth century, stand in for the cultural history and consumer experience of the telephone and the telegraph.

Communication and Empire is instead valuable to historians of technology for its portrayal of the complex interplay of technology, business, and diplomacy that generated the modern global communications systems. The chapter on the introduction of telegraphic technology to China exemplifies this messy process. Through a combination of diplomatic negotiation, exclusive contracts, brute force, and subterfuge, cable concerns such as the British Eastern Associated Company and the Danish Great Northern Company established telegraph lines between the key trading centers of Shanghai and Hong Kong and linked China to the worldwide network. They justified their actions with bright words lauding the role of global telegraphic links in China’s future progress and economic development. Yet a darker, more cutthroat reality lurked behind this rosy rhetoric. As a British observer of the effort to open China to international trade and communications wrote, “This is a war of extermination. No prisoners are being made, everything living is being killed. It is the only way of dealing with these people horrible though it may seem” (p. 141).

As this example makes clear, international cooperation only went so far. States subjected to Western imperial power, whether of the “hard” or “soft” variety, struggled to create communications systems that served their own national interests rather than the interests of foreigners. And yet neither was imperial power a monolith: some countries succeeded in advancing their own interests, as one learns thanks to the global scope of Winseck and Pike’s work. In contrast to the Chinese, for example, Japan invited Western telegraphic companies in on Japanese terms, refused to be restricted by exclusive concessions to the major cable companies, and limited Western control of telegraphic systems by training native Japanese telegraph operators and engineers to operate and maintain the lines.

Winseck and Pike’s argument turns a corner at World War I. As the war approached and tensions between nations grew, interdependence, cooperation, and openness fell out of favor. Telegraph cables connecting Germany to the outside world were cut, forcing the German government to rely on radio for long-distance communications. The news agency Reuters served Britain as a channel for wartime propaganda. Government control of information became more important than the perceived economic benefit derived from the free flow of information.

Like many things, international communications was never quite the same after the war. At first, discussions about rebuilding war-ravaged communications systems centered around two competing versions of openness, globalization and freedom, labeled by the authors “thick” and “thin” globalism. The first, championed by Woodrow Wilson, envisioned a world transformed by democracy and associated Western values of openness and freedom. The second, temporarily more successful, globalism, promoted by business interests, conceived of freedom...