The first electronic communication network transformed language, distance, and time. This book researches the telegraph system of the British Indian Empire, c.1850 to 1920, exploring one of the most significant transnational phenomena of the imperial world, and the link between communication, Empire, and social change.

The first electronic communication network transformed language, distance, and time. This book researches the telegraph system of the British Indian Empire, c.1850 to 1920, exploring one of the most significant transnational phenomena of the imperial world, and the link between communication, Empire, and social change.

Telecommunications was vital to the imperial project and connecting India—the jewel in the British crown—was a key priority. However, intercolonial rivalries outside and within India as well as contestations between private and public ownership of telecommunications made that task difficult. The author explores these differences and ties the history of telegraph, cable, and wireless in British India to the evolving story of telecommunications in post-Independence India. This book examines the role of the telegraph, oceanic cables, and the wireless in the context of the political economy and compulsions of Empire to control global flows of communications. It argues that history is absolutely critical to understanding the present, and the imprint of the past continues to shape the Indian state’s engagements with telecommunications. This volume undertakes the project of bridging the gap between past and present, and highlighting a narrative of time- and space-specific innovation and growth tempered by political circumstances, geopolitical developments, and economic compulsions.

This book explores the legacy of the Japanese empire in Korea, asking how colonialism arose as a legal idea. What was the legal process behind the establishment of colonialism as Japan's prime strategy towards Korea since the late 19th century? By addressing such questions, it is not only possible to address how Japanese colonialism in Korea was born, but also address how the process behind the making of colonialism as a judicial and legal project was illegal from its origination. As East Asia grapples with a new generation of power politics, these sober reflects lend an important historical context to the struggles of the present.

A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between Hawai‘i and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a center of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great powers of Europe and America competed to bring Samoa into their orbits, Germany and the United States eventually agreed to divide the islands for their burgeoning colonial holdings. In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler examines the Samoan response through the lives of its workers. Ordinary Samoans—some on large plantations, others on their own small holdings—picked and processed coconuts and cocoa, tapped rubber trees, and built roads and ports that brought cash crops to Europe and North America. At the same time, Samoans redefined their own way of being in the world—what Droessler terms “Oceanian globality”—to challenge German and American visions of a global economy that in fact served only the needs of Western capitalism. Through cooperative farming, Samoans contested the exploitative wage-labor system introduced by colonial powers. The islanders also participated in ethnographic shows around the world, turning them into diplomatic missions and making friends with fellow colonized peoples. Samoans thereby found ways to press their own agendas and regain a degree of independence. Based on research in multiple languages and countries, Coconut Colonialism offers new insights into the global history of labor and empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

How have sound and empire shaped one another historically? Acoustics of Empire recovers a sonic history that is bound up with imperial power and colonial rule. Bringing together contributions from historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, this book emphasizes the entangled histories of sound and empire. The intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.

This study offers an analysis of the technological and entrepreneurial features of the Victorian telegraph service, together with the companies which ran it until nationalization in 1869. It shows a historical reconstruction mainly based on original and unedited documents belonging to a variety of archives.

A revealing insight into the links between globalization and the technological advances in communication brought about by the telegraph network.

Empires of Panic is the first book to explore how panics have been historically produced, defined, and managed across different colonial, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early nineteenth-century East Asia to twenty-first-century America. Contributors consider panic in relation to colonial anxieties, rumors, indigenous resistance, and crises, particularly in relation to epidemic disease. How did Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities understand, deal with, and neutralize panics? What role did evolving technologies of communication play in the amplification of local panics into global events? Engaging with these questions, the book challenges conventional histories to show how intensifying processes of intelligence gathering did not consolidate empire, but rather served to produce critical uncertainties—the uneven terrain of imperial panic. Robert Peckham is associate professor in the Department of History and co-director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. "Charting the relays of rumor and knowledge that stoke colonial fears of disease, disorder, and disaster, Empires of Panic offers timely and cautionary insight into how viscerally epidemics inflame imperial anxieties, and how words and their communication over new technologies accelerate panic, rally government intervention, and unsettle and entrench the exercise of global power. Relevant a century ago and even more so today." — Nayan Shah, University of Southern California; author ofContagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown "Empires generated anxiety as much as ambition. This fine study focuses on anxieties generated by disease. It is the first book of its kind to track shifting forms of panic through different geopolitical regimes and imperial formations over the course of two centuries. Working across medical and imperial histories, it is a major contribution to both." — Andrew S. Thompson, University of Exeter; author of Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914(with Gary B. Magee)