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Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930. By Dwayne R.Winseck and Robert M. Pike. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. xx+429. $89.95/$24.95.
Communication and Empire presents a richly detailed picture of the early history of global electronic communications networks. In a break fromprevious narratives, Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike argue that, before World War I, the development of international communications networks (primarily telegraph and radio, in this account) wasmarked by cooperation and interdependence rather than nationalistic or imperial competition. Western communications companies operated across national borders, cooperating and competing primarily according to their own business interests, not the national interests of the countries in which they were based. Although this cooperation broke down in the run-up toWorldWar I, when national security concerns took on amore dominant role in shaping worldwide communications systems, it is a mistake to project these concerns back into the period before the war.
Winseck and Pike's account is not a history of technology per se; there is virtually no discussion of the technical workings or the invention of telegraphy, telephony, or radio. Furthermore, the authors only rarely discuss the lived experiences of communications technologies. Two images, of American women sending a telegramandmaking a phone call at the beginning of the twentieth century,...