The British Empire and the International Telegraph
The British Empire built the world’s first global communications system, and it did so for the same reason it built the world’s first global shipping system: the system had to exist before the empire could be administered. Daniel Headrick’s The Tentacles of Progress (1988) made the case that the technological scaffolding of European imperialism — the steamship, the submarine cable, the railway, the quinine prophylaxis — was the precondition of nineteenth-century empire. The submarine cable network was the communications layer of that scaffolding, and the British dominated it for the simple reason that the British Empire was the only state in the late nineteenth century that needed it.
From Optical Telegraphy to Electric
Optical telegraphy — the Chappe semaphore system in France, the Murray shutter system in Britain — had been a continental European instrument. The British military, having rejected the optical system in the 1790s, did not adopt it. The British took up electric telegraphy in 1837, when William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone demonstrated the five-needle telegraph on the Great Western Railway. By 1851, the Electric Telegraph Company had strung 4,000 miles of wire across Britain, and the electric telegraph was, for the railway companies and the press, a commercial proposition. The 1851 laying of the first submarine cable, across the English Channel from Dover to Calais, opened the international network.
The 1858 transatlantic cable, laid by Cyrus West Field’s Atlantic Telegraph Company from Valentia Island, Ireland, to Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, was the over-reach of the era: the cable failed within weeks, and Field spent the next eight years raising the capital to try again. The 1866 cable, laid from the SS Great Eastern and recovered, repaired, and completed by the engineers on board, was the founding moment of the international telegraph. The Great Eastern had been built for the China run, had failed as a cable layer, and had been converted, after its bankruptcy, into a cable ship. The detail is the right image for the period: a failed imperial infrastructure converted into a working global one.
The British Cable Companies
The 1870s saw the consolidation of the British cable network. The Eastern Telegraph Company, formed in 1872 by John Pender’s merger of four smaller companies, dominated the eastern hemisphere: by 1900, the Company and its associates operated 60,000 nautical miles of cable, and carried three-quarters of the world’s telegraph traffic between Europe and Asia. The Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company extended the network to Australia in the 1870s. The Anglo-American Telegraph Company controlled the Atlantic routes. By 1900, British companies operated 73 per cent of the world’s submarine cable mileage. The US and German carriers together held 14 per cent. The structure is the structure Headrick described: the technology of European empire was a British monopoly, not a European one.
The 1870 Indo-European Telegraph Line — strung from London to Calcutta via Berlin, Warsaw, Odessa, Tiflis, Tehran, and Karachi — was the British answer to the Russian overland line. The 1902 Pacific Cable, from Canada to New Zealand via Fiji and Norfolk Island, completed the system. By 1902, the “All-Red Line” — the system of cables connecting all parts of the British Empire under British control — was the operational communications backbone of the British imperial system. The political point of the system, articulated by the Imperial Defence Committee from the 1880s, was that in the event of war, British control of the cables would allow the Admiralty to communicate with the fleet and the colonial governments without recourse to foreign carriers.
The Wireless Turn
The wireless challenge to the cable network came from Marconi’s company. The 1896 patent of the wireless telegraph, the 1899 demonstration across the English Channel, and the 1901 transatlantic transmission from Poldhu, Cornwall, to Signal Hill, Newfoundland, opened the technology. The Marconi company pressed, throughout the 1900s, for the construction of a chain of high-power wireless stations that would allow point-to-point long-distance communication without the cable. The 1919 Marconi scandals — in which the company bribed members of the Lloyd George government to secure the imperial wireless contract — produced the 1921 Bridgeman inquiry and the 1926 reconstitution of the company as the Imperial and International Communications Company, which merged the Eastern Telegraph and the Marconi wireless interests into a single British-controlled communications company under the brand name Cable & Wireless.
Cable & Wireless held the imperial wireless chain through the 1930s. The chain was a strategic asset in 1914: the Admiralty’s first wireless intelligence of the German High Seas Fleet came from the intercepts at the Yarmouth and Cleethorpes stations. The chain was the precondition of the 1920s and 1930s imperial communications system, in which the Governor of Singapore could communicate with the Colonial Office in London, and the Commander-in-Chief East Indies with the Admiralty, without recourse to foreign carriers. The political economy of the chain was, in James Barr’s A Line in the Sand (2021) and in the more technical literature, the communications layer of the “informal empire” of the inter-war period.
The Decolonisation of the Network
The decolonisation of the international telegraph was, in the 1960s, a consequence of decolonisation. The 1947 independence of India, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and the 1960s independence of the African and Caribbean colonies each removed a major node from the British network. Cable & Wireless survived as a partly-privatised company, but the imperial system of all-red cables no longer existed as an integrated commercial entity. The 1981 Telecommunications Act, the 1981 sale of Cable & Wireless’s stake in the Commonwealth cable system, and the 1990s liberalisation of the international telecommunications market dissolved the imperial system. The economic historian Michael Sturma’s work on the politics of the imperial wireless chain and the historian Andrew Jason Cohen’s work on the post-1945 Commonwealth telecommunications system describe the long dissolution.
The historian of technology Steven Lovell’s work on the cable companies and Alexander Schenker’s work on the engineers who built the cable network give the technical detail. Eugene Ferguson’s Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (1992) reads the cable engineers as the kind of workers who made the British imperial system function at the level of physical infrastructure. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s communications legacy a clean bill of health.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the international telegraph has been transformed since the 1960s by three interventions. Daniel Headrick’s Tentacles of Progress (1988) and Power Over Peoples (2010) argued that the technological infrastructure of European empire was, for the period 1850–1914, the precondition of imperial expansion. James Barr’s A Line in the Sand (2021) and his earlier Lords of the Desert (2018) read the cable network as the strategic layer of the British informal empire in the inter-war period. The unresolved question is the weight to assign to strategic, commercial, and political motivations in the construction of the cable network. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s communications legacy a clean bill of health.