Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T02:58:04.510Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘The telegraph and the bank’: on the interdependence of global communications and capitalism, 1866–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2015

Simone M. Müller  and
Heidi J.S. Tworek
Simone M. Müller
Affiliation:
Historisches Seminar, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Rempartstr. 15, 79085 Freiburg, Germany E-mail: [email protected]
Heidi J.S. Tworek
Affiliation:
201 Robinson Hall, Harvard History Department, 35 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses the example of submarine telegraphy to trace the interdependence between global communications and modern capitalism. It uncovers how cable entrepreneurs created the global telegraph network based upon particular understandings of cross-border trade, while economists such as John Maynard Keynes and John Hobson saw global communications as the foundation for capitalist exchange. Global telegraphic networks were constructed to support extant capitalist systems until the 1890s, when states and corporations began to lay telegraph cables to open up new markets, particularly in Asia and Latin America, as well as for strategic and military reasons. The article examines how the interaction between telegraphy and capitalism created particular geographical spaces and social orders despite opposition from myriad Western and non-Western groups. It argues that scholars need to account for the role of infrastructure in creating asymmetrical information and access to trade that have continued to the present day.

Keywords

capitalismglobalizationimperialisminformation asymmetryinfrastructuretelegraphy
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 259 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

References

1 Angell, Norman, The great illusion: a study of the relation of military power in nations to their economic and social advantage, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1911Google Scholar, pp. 184–5.

2 Bright, Charles, ‘An all-British or Anglo-American Pacific cable’, in Charles Bright, ed., Imperial telegraphic communication, London: P. S. King & Son, 1911Google Scholar, p. 39; Bright, Charles, Submarine telegraphs: their history, construction and working, London: C. Lockwood, 1898, p. 144Google Scholar; Wenzlhuemer, Roland, Connecting the nineteenth-century world: the telegraph and globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013Google Scholar, p. 119.

3 On the concept of structuration as a bridge between structure and agency, see Giddens, Anthony, New rules of sociological method: a positive critique of interpretative sociologies, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993Google Scholar, p. 169.

4 Ahvenainen, Jorma, ‘The role of telegraphs in the 19th century revolution of communications’, in Michael North, ed., Kommunikationsrevolutionen: die neuen Medien des 16. und 19. Jahrhunderts, Cologne: Böhlau, 1995Google Scholar, p. 79.

5 Winseck, Dwayne and Pike, Robert, Communication and empire: media, markets, and globalization, 1860– 1930, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Headrick, Daniel, The invisible weapon: telecommunications and international politics, 1851–1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991Google Scholar; Hills, Jill, The struggle for control of global communication: the formative century, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002Google Scholar; Nickles, David Paull, Under the wire: how the telegraph changed diplomacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003Google Scholar; Starr, Paul, The creation of the media: political origins of modern communications, New York: Basic Books, 2004Google Scholar.

7 Hoag, Christopher, ‘The Atlantic telegraph cable and capital market information flows’, Journal of Economic History, 66, 2, 2006, pp. 342–353CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michie, Ranald, The London and New York stock exchanges, 1850–1914, London: Allen & Unwin, 1987Google Scholar. For an important start, see Johnson, Paul, Making the market: Victorian origins of modern capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar, part 3.

8 Headrick, Daniel and Griset, Pascal, ‘Submarine telegraph cables: business and politics, 1838–1939’, Business History Review, 75, 3, 2001, pp. 543–578CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, Richard R., Network nation: inventing American telecommunications, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan, The international distribution of news: the Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On communication and empire, see Innis, Harold, Empire and communications, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007Google Scholar.

9 Bharat Anand, Rafael Di Tella, and Alexander Galetovic, ‘Information or opinion? Media bias as product differentiation’, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 16, 3, 2007, pp. 635–82; Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson, ‘The effect of newspaper entry and exit on electoral politics’, American Economic Review, 101, 7, 2011, pp. 2980–3018; Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson, ‘Competition and ideological diversity: historical evidence from US newspapers’, American Economic Review, 2014, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/matthew.gentzkow/research/competition.pdf (consulted 20 June 2014).

10 John, Network nation; Wolff, Joshua, Western Union and the creation of the American corporate order, 1845–1893, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hochfelder, David, The telegraph in America, 1832–1920, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012Google Scholar.

11 Wenzlhuemer, Roland, ‘The dematerialization of telecommunication: communication centres and peripheries in Europe and the world, 1850–1920’, Journal of Global History, 2, 3, 2007, pp. 345–372CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kern, Stephen, The culture of time and space, 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993Google Scholar.

12 Müller, Simone M., ‘Beyond the means of 99 percent of the population: business interests, state intervention, and submarine telegraphy’, Journal of Policy History, 27, 3, forthcoming 2015Google Scholar.

13 Alexander Engel, ‘Buying time: futures trading and telegraphy in nineteenth-century global commodity markets’, in this issue, pp. 284–306.

14 On multinationals, see Jones, Geoffrey, Multinationals and global capitalism: from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005Google Scholar; Mazlish, Bruce and Jr, Alfred Chandler, eds., Leviathans: multinational corporations and the new global history, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005Google Scholar; Mira Wilkins, ed., The growth of multinationals, Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1991.

15 Tooze, J. Adam, ‘Imagining national economies: national and international economic statistics, 1900–1950’, in Geoffrey Cubitt, ed., Imagining nations, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998Google Scholar, pp. 214–15.

16 Quinn Slobodian, ‘How to see the world economy: statistics, maps, and Schumpeter's camera in the first age of globalization’, in this issue, pp. 307–32.

17 For historiography on telegraphy, see M. Michaela Hampf and Simone Müller-Pohl, ‘Introduction’, in M. Michaela Hampf and Simone Müller-Pohl, eds., Global communication electric: business, news and politics in the world of telegraphy, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013, pp. 7–32.

18 Osterhammel, Jürgen, The transformation of the world: a global history of the nineteenth century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014Google Scholar, p. 721.

19 Pike, Winseck and, Communication and empire, p. 16Google Scholar; The Telcon story 1850–1950, London: Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, 1950, p. 25.

20 Field, Cyrus W., Ocean telegraphy: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the organization of the first company ever formed to lay an ocean cable, New York: printed for private circulation only, 1879Google Scholar, p. 34.

21 For the classic work on managerial capitalism, see Chandler, Alfred, The visible hand: the managerial revolution in American business, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977Google Scholar.

22 On railways, see Dunlavy, Colleen, Politics and industrialization: early railroads in the United States and Prussia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994Google Scholar; White, Richard, Railroaded: the transcontinentals and the making of modern America, New York: Norton, 2011Google Scholar.

23 Hobsbawm, Eric, The age of capital, 1848–1875, New York: Vintage Books, 1996, pp. 214–215Google Scholar; Ferguson, Niall, The ascent of money, New York: Penguin Press, 2008, pp. 120–122Google Scholar.

24 Sassen, Saskia, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991Google Scholar.

25 Tully, John, ‘A Victorian ecological disaster: imperialism, the telegraph, and gutta-percha’, Journal of World History, 20, 4, 2009, pp. 559–579Google Scholar.

26 Pfitzner, Helmuth, Seekabel und Funktelegraphie: im überseeischen Schnellnachrichtenwesen, Leipzig: Curt Böttger Verlag, 1931, pp. 47–48Google Scholar.

27 On natural monopoly theory, see Markus Wagner, ‘Legal perspectives and regulatory philosophies on natural monopolies in the United States and Germany’, in Günther Schulz, Mathias Schmoeckel, and William Hausman, eds., Regulation between legal norms and economic reality: intentions, effects, and adaptation: the German and American experiences, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014, pp. 53–74; Sharkey, William, The theory of natural monopoly, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989Google Scholar; Mosca, Manuela, ‘On the origins of the concept of natural monopoly’, European Journal for the History of Economic Thought, 45, 2, 2008, pp. 317–353Google Scholar.

28 Institution of Engineering and Technology Archives, NAEST 17/105, Bright, Charles, ‘Imperial telegraphic communication and the “All-British” Pacific cable’, London Chamber of Commerce pamphlet series, 40, 1902Google Scholar, p. 39.

29 Brown, J., The cable and wireless communications of the world: a survey of present day means of international communication by cable and wireless, London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1927Google Scholar, p. 11.

30 Bright, , Submarine telegraphs, p. 167Google Scholar.

31 Daqing Yang, ‘From partnership to confrontation: Japan and the Great Northern Telegraph Company, 1871–1943’, in Hampf and Müller-Pohl, Global communication electric, pp. 117–45.

32 On these systems, see Headrick, Daniel, The tentacles of progress: technology transfer in the age of imperialism, 1850–1940, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988Google Scholar, p. 105; Robert Boyce, ‘Imperial dreams and national realities: Britain, Canada and the struggle for a Pacific telegraph cable, 1879–1902’, English Historical Review, 115, 460, 2000, p. 43.

33 The cartel included Associated Press from 1893 to 1933/34. See Nalbach, Alexander, ‘“Poisoned at the source”? Telegraphic news services and big business in the nineteenth century’, Business History Review, 77, 4, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp. 577–610; Rantanen, Terhi, ‘Foreign dependence and domestic monopoly: the European news cartel and US associated presses, 1861–1932’, Media History, 12, 1, 2006, pp. 19–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tworek, Heidi, ‘The creation of European news: news agency cooperation in interwar Europe’, Journalism Studies, 14, 5, 2013, pp. 730–742CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Michael Palmer, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, and Terhi Rantanen, ‘Global financial news’, in Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Terhi Rantanen, eds., The globalization of news, London: Thousand Oaks, 1998, p. 61.

35 Beauchamp, Kenneth, History of telegraphy, London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 80.

36 Hills, , Struggle for control, p. 34Google Scholar.

37 Silberstein-Loeb, , International distribution, p. 165Google Scholar.

38 E.g. Roscher, Max, ‘Über das Wesen und die Bedingungen des internationalen Nachrichtenverkehrs’, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 3, 1, 1914, pp. 37–59Google Scholar.

39 Ahvenainen, ‘Role of telegraphs’, p. 21.

40 Lew, Byron and Cater, Bruce, ‘The telegraph, co-ordination of tramp shipping, and growth in world trade, 1870–1910’, European Review of Economic History, 10, 2006, pp. 147–173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Evans, Heidi, ‘“The path to freedom”? Transocean and German wireless telegraphy, 1914–1922’, Historical Social Research, 35, 1, 2010, p. 227Google Scholar.

42 Bright, , Submarine telegraphs, p. 172Google Scholar.

43 Engel, ‘Buying time’.

44 Ogle, Vanessa, ‘Whose time is it? The pluralization of time and the global condition, 1870s to 1940s’, American Historical Review, 120, 5, 2013, pp. 1376–1402Google Scholar.

45 Karl Marx, ‘The commercial crisis in Britain’, in Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), vol. 14, Berlin: Dietz, 2001, p. 37.

46 Preda, Alex, Framing finance: the boundaries of markets and modern capitalism, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Keynes, John Maynard, The economic consequences of the peace, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009Google Scholar (first published 1920), p. 11.

48 Headrick, Daniel, The tools of empire: technology and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981Google Scholar; John, Richard R., ‘Projecting power overseas: U. S. postal policy and international standard-setting at the 1863 Paris postal conference’, Journal of Policy History, 27, 3, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar, forthcoming.

49 Maier, Charles S., ‘Consigning the twentieth century to history: alternative narratives for the modern era’, American History Review, 105, 3, 2000Google Scholar, pp. 807–31.

50 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London: Verso, 1991Google Scholar.

51 Ott, Julia, When Wall Street met Main Street: the quest for an investors’ democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Sluga, Glenda, Internationalism in the age of nationalism, Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Badenoch, Alexander and Fickers, Andreas, eds., Materializing Europe: transnational infrastructures and the project of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Ahvenainen, Jorma and Britton, John, ‘Showdown in South America: James Scrymser, John Pender, and United States–British cable competition’, Business History Review, 78, 1, 2004, pp. 1–27Google Scholar.

55 Alan Taylor, ‘Foreign capital in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, NBER Working Paper Series No. 9580, March 2003, http://www.nber.org/papers/w9580 (consulted 14 August 2014).

56 James Anderson 1887, cited in J. H. Heaton, ‘Penny-a-word telegrams throughout the empire’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, 40, 1908–09, p. 4. On cables to Latin America, see Britton, John, Cables, crises, and the press: the geopolitics of the new international information system in the Americas, 1866–1903, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013Google Scholar.

57 Library and Archives Canada, Mackenzie Bowell in ‘Proceedings of the Colonial Conference, June 28–July 9, 1894’, Ottawa: Printed by S. E. Dawson, 1894, pp. 21–30.

58 Healy, David, US expansionism: the imperialist urge in the 1890s, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970Google Scholar, p. 37.

59 Library of Congress, Early Motion Pictures 1897–1920, ‘President McKinley's speech at the Pan-American Exposition, September 1901’, video and transcription by Thomas A. Edison, 11 September 1901.

60 Winseck and Pike, Communication and empire.

61 ‘The missing link found’, Punch, 51, 4, August 1866, p. 55, http://www.sciper.org/luceneweb/hri3/display.jsp?mode=sciper&file=PU1-51.html&reveal=issue_PU1-51-5#PU1-51-5-8 (consulted 23 June 2014).

62 On the interrelation of communication and empire, see Innis, Empire and communications; Winseck and Pike, Communication and empire; Bayly, Christopher, Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007Google Scholar.

63 Potter, Simon, News and the British world: the emergence of an imperial press system, 1876–1922, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Bright, Submarine telegraphs, p. xiii.

65 New York Public Library, Field Papers, Newfoundland &. T. C. New York, ‘Company's description, July 1872’.

66 Winseck and Pike, Communication and empire, p. 170.

67 Griset and Headrick, ‘Submarine telegraph cables’, pp. 566–7.

68 Slobodian, ‘How to see the world economy’.

69 Léonard Laborie, ‘Global commerce in small boxes: parcel post, 1878–1913’, in special issue, pp. 000–000.

70 Hobson, John, The evolution of modern capitalism: a study of machine production, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902Google Scholar (first published 1894), p. 98.

71 Hobson, John, ‘The ethics of internationalism’, International Journal of Ethics, 17, 1, 1906, p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Hirst, Paul, ‘Politics: territorial or non-territorial?’, in Jean Hillier, ed., Habitus: a sense of place, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, p. 78Google Scholar.

73 Osterhammel, Jürgen, Europe, the ‘West’ and the civilizing mission, London: German Historical Institute, 2006, p. 22Google Scholar.

74 On the Anti-Corn Law League, see Pickering, Paul and Tyrell, Alex, The people's bread: a history of the Anti-Corn Law League, London: Leicester University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

75 Claeys, Gregory, Imperial sceptics: British critics of empire, 1850–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 28. On Manchester Liberalism, see Grampp, William, The Manchester School of Economics, London: Routledge, 1993Google Scholar.

76 Judson, Isabella Field, Cyrus W. Field, his life and work, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896, p. 243Google Scholar.

77 John, , Network nation, p. 182Google Scholar.

78 ‘Telegraph companies and charges’, Daily News, 17 February 1873.

79 Bright, , Submarine telegraphs, pp. 143–144Google Scholar.

80 BT Archives, Anglo-American Telegraph Company Ltd., ‘Tariff Book, 1866–1871’, p. 9.

81 H. Thurn, Die Seekabel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der deutschen Seekabeltelegraphie, Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1909, p. 193.

82 Bright, , Submarine telegraphs, p. 176Google Scholar.

83 American Seed Trade Association, Telegraph code: for vegetable, clover, grass, tree, field and miscellaneous seeds markets, stocks, shipping, etc., New York, 1895, p. i.

84 Bright, Submarine telegraphs, p. 176.

85 Porthcurno Cable and Wireless Archive, James Anderson Papers, The Globe Telegraph Company, ‘Report of the proceedings at an anniversary banquet given by Mr. Cyrus W. Field, of New York at the Buckingham Palace Hotel, London, on Monday, the 10th March, 1873, in commemoration of the signature of the agreement on the 10th of March, 1854, for the establishment of the telegraph across the Atlantic’, p. 10.

86 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, London: Pluto Press, 2008Google Scholar (first published 1848), pp. 38–40.

87 Martin Doll, ‘The wiring of the working class: on the interdependence of telegraphy and social-revolutionary discourses in the nineteenth century’, in Hampf and Müller-Pohl, Global communication electric, p. 93; Anderson, Imagined communities, p. 133.

88 Hochfelder, David, ‘Where the common people could speculate: the ticker, bucket shops, and the origins of popular participation in financial markets, 1880–1920’, Journal of American History, 93, 2, 2006, pp. 335–358Google Scholar.

89 On mental maps, see Conrad, Christoph, ‘Vorbemerkung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28, 3, 2002, pp. 339–342Google Scholar.

90 Morus, Iwan, ‘The nervous system of Great Britain: space, time and the electric telegraph in the Victorian age’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33, 4, 2000, pp. 455–475CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Hobsbawm, , Age of capital, p. 60Google Scholar.

92 Adas, Michael, Dominance by design: technological imperatives and America's civilizing mission, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 New York Public Library, George Kennan Papers, letter from George Kennan to his mother, 26 December 1866.

94 Jepsen, Thomas, My sisters telegraphic: women in the telegraph office, 1846–1950, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

95 Simone Müller-Pohl, ‘“By Atlantic Telegraph”: a study on Weltcommunication in the 19th century’, Medien & Zeit, 4, 2010, pp. 40–54.

96 Doe, Helen, ‘Waiting for her ship to come in? The female investor in nineteenth-century sailing vessels’, Economic History Review, 63, 1, 2010, pp. 85–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Hobson, John, Imperialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010Google Scholar (first published 1902).

98 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, 1917, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ (consulted 23 June 2014).

99 Peter Shulman, ‘Ben Franklin's ghost: world peace, American slavery, and the global politics of information before the Universal Postal Union’, in this issue, pp. 212–34.

100 Thomas Lenschau, Das Weltkabelnetz, Halle an der Saale: Gebauer-Schwetschke Druckerei und Verlag, 1903; Röscher, Max, ‘Das Weltkabelnetz’, Archiv für Post und Telegraphie, 16, 1914, pp. 373–389Google Scholar.

101 Rieger, Bernhard, Technology and the culture of modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005Google Scholar, p. 18.

102 Tworek, Heidi, ‘Magic connections: German news agencies and global news networks, 1905–1945’, Enterprise & Society, 15, 4, 2014, pp. 672–687Google Scholar.

103 Michael Friedewald, ‘Telefunken vs. Marconi, or the race for wireless telegraphy at sea, 1896–1914’, Working paper, 2012, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2375755 (consulted 18 August 2014).

104 Winseck and Pike, Communication and empire, ch. 4.

105 Bektas, Yakup, ‘The Sultan's messenger: cultural constructions of Ottoman telegraph, 1847–1880’, Technology and Culture, 41, 4, 2000, pp. 669–696CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 ‘Lawlessness in Morocco’, The Times, 25 March 1907, p. 5.

107 Hofmeyr, Isabel, Gandhi's printing press: experiments in slow reading, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 Kaul, Chandrika, Reporting the Raj: the British press and India, c. 1880–1922, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003Google Scholar.

109 Headrick, Daniel, ‘A double-edged sword: communications and imperial control in British India’, Historical Social Research, 35, 1, 2010, pp. 51–65Google Scholar.

110 Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anti-colonial nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007Google Scholar.

111 Akami, Tomoko, Japan's news propaganda and Reuters’ news empire in Northeast Asia, 1870–1934, Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2012Google Scholar.

112 Green, Nile, ‘Shared infrastructures, informational asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c. 1890–1930’, Journal of Global History, 8, 3, 2013, pp. 414–435CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Yang, Daqing, Technology of empire: telecommunications and Japanese expansion in Asia, 1883–1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 Starr, , Creation of the media, p. 6Google Scholar; Zakharova, Larissa, ‘Téléphones et télégraphes au pays des Soviets: vecteurs et procédés de circulation des techniques de communication en URSS (1918–1939)’, Histoire, Economie, Sociétés, 31, 4, 2012, pp. 75–90Google Scholar.

115 Williams, Francis, Transmitting world news: a study of telecommunications and the press, Paris: Unesco, 1953Google Scholar. See also James R. Brennan, ‘The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa: decolonization, the free flow of information, and the media business, 1960–1980’, in this issue, pp. 333–56.

116 Roscher, ‘Über das Wesen’, pp. 57–8.

117 Lee Mwiti, ‘East Africa: sea cable ushers in new Internet era’, 23 July 2009, http://allafrica.com/stories/200907230954.html (consulted 3 August 2009); Diane McCarthy, ‘Cable makes big promises for African Internet’, 23 July 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/22/seacom.on/index.html (consulted 11 June 2011).