Girdling the Globe
Michael Mann · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017
The history of connecting communities, countries, and continents by cables in the second half of the nineteenth century, usually narrated as an Anglo-American, trans-Atlantic success story, is challenged by a multi-centred perspective taking into account developments in British India, China, and other parts of the world. Rather than being a history of bilateral international connections it is argued that transnationally operating cable cartels, trans-local personal patronage, and national patents substantially influenced the evolvement of the world-wide cable-web. International competition between private cable companies and public post and telegraph offices eventually caused massive tariff reductions and strikes of telegraphists in British India and the US at the beginning of the twentieth century—all of which point at the interconnectivity of the cable network and the global entanglement of organizations and persons. Interconnectivity is also exemplified by the history of the International Telegraph Union which, from the very beginning of telegraphy, tried to overcome national boundaries.