Information, communication technology, and business in the nineteenth century: The case of a Finnish merchant house
Mika Kallioinen · Scandinavian Economic History Review · 2004
Historically, access to recent and reliable information has been a central problem in business. The present paper is concerned with the role of information and communication technology in international trade in the nineteenth century. The world's first modern instrument of information technology, the telegraph, had a wide-ranging impact on business, though to refer to it as a revolution is an exaggeration. For centuries, prices and other data were obtained by postal correspondence, and this method remained unchanged after the introduction of the telegraph, As the path dependence theorem would suggest, the adoption of the telegraph was not a straight-forward process. In the nineteenth century the availability of business information was improved because of the progress in information technology and also because of the extension of the merchants' personal business networks. This reduced the information costs by improving the quality of information, in particular the speed, reliability and the intervals— how frequently it was possible to receive messages from the market.