Closing the final link - so lautete der Slogan, als 2009 fünf ostafrikanische Staaten per Seetelegrafenkabel mit der Arabischen Halbinsel verbunden wurden. Fast 150 Jahre zuvor hatten die englische Königin Victoria und US-Präsident James Buchanan bei der Verlegung des ersten transatlantischen Telegrafenkabels ganz ähnliche Worte gefunden. Der Sammelband umfasst 15 Aufsätze in englischer Sprache, die - auf dem neuesten Stand der Forschung - die Telegrafie als Medium und Technologie der Moderne, den Telegrafen als zentrales Instrument einer globalen Kommunikation darstellen.

Michaela Hampf ist Juniorprofessorin am John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien an der FU Berlin. Simone Müller-Pohl M.A. ist dort wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin.

On April 16, 1879 Emma Pender, wife of cable magnate and head of the Eastern and Associated Companies, John Pender, was having tea with her lady friends at her London house, when she received a package from her daughter in Fiji by the Melbourne steamer. Her daughter's letter accompanying the package was dated January 15, a good three months before the package interrupted Emma Pender's tea engagement. Her daughter asked Pender to send her a telegram to indicate how long the package had taken to arrive. While Emma Pender swiftly set her servant to this task, the package stirred a tea time discussion among the ladies present who all declared "the size of [their] world cruel." Pender later recalled in a letter to her daughter that it fell to the hostess to remind her excited guests of "older days" without the telegraph and "no regular mail at all." For Victorian upper class women, telegraphy and the global communications system swiftly became integral parts of their everyday lives. Indeed, Pender's interaction with her daughter was embedded in a world-wide system of regular mail and parcel service, railway and steamship transportation and messenger boys as well as telegraphy. The size of the world might have seemed cruel to ladies enjoying high tea in Victorian London, but the global communciations system had enabled them to idealize an electric world in union in the first place. Telegraphs are an emblem of modernity as well as catalysts of our present global condition. The establishment of an extensive and world-spanning network of landline and submarine cable connections in the mid-nineteenth century fostered the emergence of structures and patterns of interaction on a global scale. World politics, a global economy and a global media system only became possible with the creation of global communication electric. Moreover, the telegraphs caused the most dramatic globalization effects among all new technologies of the nineteenth century, as telegraph lines were easier to lay than railway tracks and transmitted news with a higher speed and greater capacity than steamships. Significant changes in long-distance communication occurred particularly after the successful completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 and the subsequent expansion of land and submarine lines to cross the Euro-American continents and establish connections from Europe and North America to India, Australia, Japan and Brazil in the 1870s. Message and messenger became more independent of each other as the former could now travel faster than the latter. Communication over large distances became telecommunication - the focus of modern media culture changed from a movement of goods to a transmission of information. This had enormous effects: news not only travelled ever faster, it also became ever more current - albeit not necessarily more newsworthy. Despite exorbitant transmission rates, increasing numbers of people used the telegraphs for political, economic and, to a lesser extent, private communication. Starting out with a few hundred telegrams per year passing through this global network, numbers rose to six million telegrams a year by the turn of the twentieth century. By 1900, much of the world had 'logged on' to global communication electric. "The universe is a procession, with measured and beautiful motion," wrote Walt Whitman in "I Sing the Body Electric," an 1855 poem that explored how the human body mediates between the spiritual and the material world. Whitman's body electric combines poetic discoveries and aesthetic manifestos with the physical body, portraying the soul as inseparable from its corporeal manifestation. So too contemporaries saw the world as a body with nerves of submarine and telegraph cables that spanned its circumference. Like Whitman's body electric, telegraph cables seemed to offer a new means to understand the soul of the world and to offer a connection that promised universal peace and harmony akin to a body in perfect working order. Contemporaries heralded telegraphy as a tool of Weltcommunication, to use a term coined by the German philosopher of technology Ernst Kapp, which practically "annihilate[d] any terrestrial dimension," meaning distance and time. Nowadays, scholars often interpret telegraphy as the chief globalizer of communication technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. As such it represented the necessary precondition for modern interaction across space and time and ultimately processes of globalization. Some studies, such as Tom Standage's 1998 monograph, The Victorian Internet, even argue for the commensurability of the nineteenth-century global telegraph network and today's use of the internet. A large majority of the existing literature on global communication and telegraphy further accentuates the telegraphs' importance for imperial control and Euro-American nationalist power politics. Scholars portray telegraphs as "tools of empire" that aided the formation and consolidation of nation states and empires or helped to generate narratives of national technological progress and development. This book critically reconsiders these grand narratives of the annihilation of time and space, the Victorian internet, imperial control and nationalist power politics. The contributions emphasize the importance of other aspects of telegraphy, such as transboundary processes of scientific and business exchanges, intergovernmental modes of governance and alternative notions of identity formation beyond and outside of the (primarily Euro-American) nation state. Neither news nor communication stopped at national boarders and in particular the ocean cable companies laid cables within the openness of maritime regions rather than within the restrictive boundaries of imperial territories. The book hence aims at exploring how global business, news and politics worked not only by means of, but also in the world of telegraphy. The methodology of global history provides a new avenue to explore telegraphy as a historical force of globalization. Informed by postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, global history expands beyond histories of globalization. Global history challenges Eurocentric narratives of modernization or Westernization alongside the methodological nationalism that thus far allowed scholars to assign cable connections a distinct nationality or imperial agenda. Global historians of telecommunication, meanwhile, use concepts of agency as well as reconceptualizations of space to approach telegraphy from a perspective that is not bound to the nation state. For example, cable companies, contractors and agents often propagated a cable cosmopolitanism that challenged and expanded state boundaries and narratives of national modernization. These actors' spaces of action aligned with the maritime space of their submarine cables, their frame of identity with their profession and its international scientific networks and their working schemes with the logic of emerging global capitalism far more than nationalist interpretations of their history have shown. The global history approach also reminds us to analyze networks of connections against the backdrop of their disconnections; to see users in relation to non-users. Finally, the global communication network also supported processes of othering by reconfiguring mental maps of the globe. As Eric Hobsbawm points out, while global news makers at the time depended upon a 'shrinkage of the globe' through the instantaneity of news coverage, their reports, such as the 'discovery' of David Livingstone, created the notion of the 'dark continent' or 'far-away' places that lay outside of the Euro-American system. Global communication electric looks at the emergence of a global media system between 1860 and 1930 from the global history perspective in order to broaden and challenge popular conceptions of telegraphy as Tools of Empire, the Victorian Internet or as a means to 'annihilate space and t...

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