Telegraph
In the nineteenth century, the telegraph appeared to offer endless possibilities, as the mysterious forces of electricity were seemingly harnessed for the purpose of breaking down boundaries between people. Yet the high costs involved in constructing and using the telegraph meant that its impact around the world was uneven. The worldwide cable network was riddled with holes, and contemporaries debated how far the state should intervene to fill these gaps. In this session, we will assess the transformations wrought by this technology, as well as its limits.
Presenters — Nicole Karageorgi and Zak Brailsford
Seminar Questions
- How successfully did telegraphs connect the disparate parts of the British Empire?
- What forces shaped the emergence of a global telegraphic network? How global was it?
- To what extent is it accurate to describe the telegraph as ‘the Victorian internet’?
- Who profited from the construction of a telegraphic network? Who was excluded?
- What impact did the telegraph have on global communications?
Essential Reading
- O’Hara, Glen. ‘New Histories of British Imperial Communication and the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries’. History Compass 8, no. 7 (2010), p. 609-625.
- Boyce, Peter. ‘Imperial Dreams and National Realities: Britain, Canada and the Struggle for a Pacific Telegraph Cable, 1879-1902’. English Historical Review 115, no. 460 (2000), p. 39-70.
- Müller, Simone M., and Heidi Tworek. ‘The Telegraph and the Bank: On the Interdependence of Global Communications and Capitalism, 1866-1914’. Journal of Global History 10, no. 2 (2015): 259-283.
Primary Source
- Fleming, Sandford. Three Letters on the Pacific Cable. Ottawa, 1899.
Further Reading
- Bonea, Amelia. The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Choudhury, Deep Kanta Lahiri. Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Headrick, Daniel. ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control in British India’. Historical Social Research 35, no. 1 (2010): 51-65.
- Headrick, Daniel. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
- Morus, Iwan Rhys. ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age’. The British Journal for the History of Science 33, no. 4 (2000): 455-475.
- Müller, Simone M. Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
- Nickles, David Paull. Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Smithies, James. ‘The Trans-Tasman Cable, the Australasian Bridgehead and Imperial History’. History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008): 691-711.
- Wenzlhuemer, Roland. ‘The Ship, The Media, And the World: Conceptualizing Connections in Global History’. Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 163-186.
- Wenzlhuemer, Roland. Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
