With the advent of the gramophone and the telephone toward the end of the last century, it finally became possible for the human voice to endure through time and to travel across long distances, circulating in ways hitherto reserved only for ghostly and other supernatural communications. In the Dutch East Indies (DEI), the first steps in this transformation took place at the height of the colonial modern period, which was also the period during which various nationalisms were starting to take shape. Like the printing press before them, these mass media provided new networks through which discourses moved, and provided new objects for reflection on life in the DEI at that time.

This chapter examines the genealogy of telephony in the DEI. This genealogy, I argue, has many different strands. Some of these strands are paths that come to an abrupt end, some of them are paths that continue on as “minor” histories, and others that continue on only as fantasies of what might had been had socio-political forces and technical developments converged and been articulated differently. The account I provide is not exhaustive but is meant to show that even the history of a technology like the telephone — an artefact whose meaning seems obvious and closed — can be read in quite different ways. Indeed, there is no reason that telephony need always be understood as an agent of modernization, globalization, capitalism and the like. Under particular conditions, for example, telephony has been used to constitute local rather than national or global identities — and this despite the fact that the major history of telephony seems to tend towards political and economic centralization, flexible forms of capital accumulation and a celebration of national or global communities.

Arguing that Indonesian telephony has minor histories challenges the notion that the modernity (and the international capitalism it was connected with) that arrived in the archipelago around the turn of the century was a singular modernity.