This chapter investigates the ways in which writers used the rapidly expanding wired networks of electrical communications technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone to reimagine notions of community, nation, and empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of electrical communication networks was motivated by, and in turn enabled, the spread of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing models of center and periphery in stark contrast with utopian predictions of global interconnection. Worth shows how telegraph and telephone wires were conceived not only as nerves connecting the globe, but also, acting as the circulatory system of Empire, as veins or arteries – “metaphorical carrier[s] not only of information but of blood.” In addition to establishing wired networks of earthly dominion, the telephone and telegraph opened imaginary connections into the uncanny and the otherworldly, seeming to transgress the boundary between life and death.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter explores the cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland. Following the institution of the Chappe télégraphe in revolutionary France, this long-distance communications technology was widely innovated and subsequently adopted by numerous governments including, briefly, the British administration at Dublin Castle. The chapter begins by discussing the promotion, in the Belfast Northern Star, of the telegraph designed by the ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It then considers the politics of telegraphic discourse in Ireland in the years leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, with a particular focus on the associations between telegraphy and the United Irish press. Finally, it suggests some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s tale ‘The White Pigeon’ (1800) and her father’s telegraph. In its connection with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance, I argue, the telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland.

At the beginning of 1845 members of parliament and newspaper leader writers celebrated the inventiveness and prosperity of Britain while also acknowledging that the ‘Condition of England Question’ cast a long shadow: ‘The people deteriorate.’ Leading writers such as Carlyle and Disraeli explored this question in their writings, often drawing upon documentary evidence in open letters to the newspapers or pamphlets framed as ‘letters’. Private letters also proliferated. Although leading figures in public life had secretaries who either wrote their employers’ letters to dictation or transcribed them in letter or copy books, senior professionals such as judges, generals, bishops and ministers of state, including prime ministers, generally wrote several letters each day, using a dip pen and inkstand while resting their paper – often a quarto sheet folded once – on a desk or table, or on a portable writing ‘slope’ or ‘desk’ when travelling. The letters of Augustus Welby Pugin and Edward FitzGerald provide examples of correspondence binding together communities of friends and colleagues through the universal penny post.

As railroads began to physically connect the United States, modern telegraph technology, commercialized by Samuel Morse, began to connect regionally diverse investors and financial analysts through financial markets. Stock markets became popular in the late eighteenth century, in large part because of telegraph technology. As the transaction costs of communication decreased, and network effects increased, more investors and financial analysists participated not only in regional stock markets, which also flourished during this period, but also national ones like the New York Stock Exchange. However, the rules designed to uphold very high-quality standards of major stock exchanges made participation in these markets unaffordable for most ordinary people hoping to invest. Additionally, many unsophisticated investors were lured into “bucket shop” schemes, which promised ordinary investors the opportunity to access Wall Street investment opportunities but whose interests were inherently at odds with investors and which more resembled a gambling option rather than an actual investment.

This chapter is an examination of the various ways senses of place have been changed by the development of electronic media since the invention of the telegraph, with particular attention to developments since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990. Impacts of electronic communications on five aspects of sense of place are considered. Neurological and ontological aspects are largely immune, but individual, social and public aspects are affected in ways that have been variously interpreted as diminishing sense of place by distracting us from our surroundings, or alternatively as enhancing it with rich data about places and increased global awareness. However, as electronic media have become increasingly pervasive, concerns have been raised about their role as agents of corporate power and their role in surveillance of places.

In this chapter, we return to the American context in order to see how intellectual property develops from within a nationalizing state during the nineteenth century. We see the extent to which America's national legal foundations were, ironically, international and Roman. In writers of early U.S. legal treatises, we see an overt embrace of Roman law as a foundation for the commercial law of the new nation. We see the implications of this in the will theory of contracts and in franchising arrangements that lay the foundations for a telecommunications network, at first for telegraphs and later for telephones. Contracts become a new instrument of legal power, one that facilitates intentional strategy in the consolidation and deployment of unprecedented levels of social power, rooted in the zones of exclusivity enabled by intellectual property. In the Bell Telephone System, we see this consolidated social power at its apex. In the regulatory reactions to this level of social power, we see early foundations for the American administrative state.

"When the first underground and submarine telegraph cables were laid around 1850, engineers noticed that sharp signals sent in at one end emerged at the other badly blurred and appreciably delayed. This “retardation” grew worse on longer cables and threatened to make operation of the proposed 2000-mile Atlantic line unprofitably slow. Retardation presented British physicists and engineers with both an intriguing physical phenomenon and a serious practical problem, and they studied it closely from the 1850s on.

Latimer Clark, a prominent British cable engineer, brought retardation to Michael Faraday’s attention late in 1853, and Faraday’s published account of the phenomenon served to publicize both retardation and the ideas about the electromagnetic field that he invoked to explain it. Faraday’s paper led William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to reprint two papers on field theory he had written in the 1840s, and later in 1854 a related cable question prompted Thomson to work out what became the accepted mathematical theory of signal transmission. Moreover, it was at just this time, and largely under Thomson’s guidance, that James Clerk Maxwell first took up the study of electricity, with results that were to transform electromagnetic theory."

The 1880s inaugurated the movement from analogue to digital communication as the global possibilities of electronic communications became visible for the first time. This chapter considers the effects of what Paul Virilio has called ‘tele-contact’ on two painters, Evelyn de Morgan and Burne-Jones, and a poet, Swinburne. All three reinvent old forms in the context of newly imagined global distance and possibilities of transmission, communication and signal-failure and loss. Evelyn De Morgan’s The Sea Maidens (sometimes called The Sea Sisters) of 1885-6 and Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1887) take up the ancient emblem of the mermaid to consider both the seductive and the dangerous possibilities of global connectivity. Their paintings dramatise the paradox of contactless contact. Swinburne re-makes the medieval French verse form of the rondeau in his A Century of Roundels (1883), a sequence of poems which undermines sequentiality and suggests the degeneration of meaning during transmission. All these works pose sharp questions about the relation of structure to meaning, of surface to depth, and of transmission to communication in the 1880s. These were fundamental questions for aesthetics, but they were also political questions.