The Transformation of the World (156 page)

Although the telegraph probably changed private lives less radically than the telephone and Internet did in later periods, its importance for commercial, military, and political activity cannot be underestimated. As far back as the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln directed his troops by means of what have been called his “T-mails.”
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Indeed, a cabled world had become imaginable already by 1800, long before the technology for its realization. Optical signals communication, such as Muhammad Ali Pasha introduced between Alexandria and Cairo in 1823, or the Russian government between Saint Petersburg and Warsaw in the 1830s, was a first practical step.
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Other innovations, above all the gradual introduction of the steamship and the perfection of mail coach services, were concurrently diminishing global dispatch times which, on the eve of the telegraphic breakthrough, were already considerably shorter than they had been around 1820.
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The electrical telegraph was tested in 1837, and Morse code was in commercial use by 1844. Underwater cables were laid all over the world in the third quarter of the century. Once it became possible to wire India (1870), China (1871), Japan (1871), Australia (1871), the Caribbean (1872), all large South American cities (by 1875), South and East Africa (1879), and West Africa (1886), an unprecedented density of information came on stream—even if it was only in October 1902 that a cable under the Pacific completed the global network.
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In the 1880s, public business information from all around the world—such as stock exchange data and price quotations—could be obtained in London within just two or three days; private cable messages usually reached the recipient within one day. In 1798 the report of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt took 62 days to arrive in London, hardly less than it would have taken 300 years earlier. In 1815 news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo reached Whitehall only two and a half days after it happened—although Nathan Mayer Rothschild had learned of it by private courier within 24 hours. On January 8, 1815, several hundred British and American soldiers met their end in the Battle of New Orleans because their commanders were unaware that the two sides had signed a peace agreement in Ghent on December 24. And just before the telegraph revolutionized the picture, letters to London were still taking 14 days from New York, 30 from Cape Town, 35 from Calcutta, 56 from Shanghai, and 60 from Sydney. A year before the transatlantic cable was laid, people in London learned only 13 days later of Lincoln's assassination in Washington, DC, on April 15, 1865. After the opening of the telegraph age, news of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Saint Petersburg on March 13, 1881, came through in just 12 hours.
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Individual markets now responded more quickly to one another, and price levels came into closer convergence. Since orders could be placed at short notice, it was no longer necessary in many business sectors to keep large stocks on the spot; this worked to the advantage of small firms. Telegraphy also smoothed the ascent of big business: large conglomerates could now operate with strewnout locations, and communicative functions previously entrusted to agents could be brought in-house more easily. Middlemen and brokers became dispensable over time.

Nor was there a lack of political effects. The telegraph increased the pressure not only on diplomats serving abroad but also on cabinets and other decision-making bodies in capital cities. The response time in international crises grew shorter, and major conferences did not last so long. Encrypted messages could be wrongly decoded or give rise to a misunderstanding. Military headquarters and embassies were soon supplied with telegraphists, who went around with cumbersome codebooks vulnerable to espionage. The fear that someone might read confidential messages, or that the code might be cracked, was not always unfounded.
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Such concerns cast a shadow over communications, and new opportunities—some hard to put into practice—opened up for censorship.

Hierarchy and Subversion in Telegraphy

The fact that the new medium was predominantly British—as telephony would later be American—had a certain influence on its military and political uses. By 1898 two-thirds of telegraph lines in the world were British owned, either by the Eastern Telegraphy Company and other state-licensed companies or directly by the Crown, US cables trailed behind in second place, while Germany accounted for just 2 percent of the total. Alongside the 156,000 kilometers belonging to British firms, a mere 7,800 were in the hands of the state—mainly in India. (Altogether, barely more than one-tenth of all lines in the world were directly controlled by governments.
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) In other words, in terms of communication, the British Empire with its public and private representatives acted as a kind of hegemonic master empire with others partly dependent on it. However, fears that Britain would use its quasi-monopoly to spy on others or to establish a communicative stranglehold were not borne out. Even the British were not invariably successful in maintaining control. Shortly before the First World War, Americans owned more and more cables in the North Atlantic.

It soon became clear that access to the network would have to be carefully regulated. During the Crimean War, when the medium was deployed for the first time, British and French commanders found themselves bombarded with a welter of contradictory telegrams from civilian politicians.
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In this respect, therefore, telegraphy tended to create new hierarchies rather than a level playing field. Only top officials permitted themselves access to it, and of course it became much easier to direct the course of negotiations abroad from headquarters in the mother country.
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The age of the grand diplomacy of unencumbered plenipotentiaries was drawing to a close.

On the other hand, autonomy might assume a new awkwardness—if enforced in situations when the cable connection failed or, as often happened in wartime, was literally severed. In September 1898, when British and French troops met near Fashoda in the Sudan in one of the most famous “duels” in imperial history (the adversaries actually drank a bottle of champagne with each other), General Kitchener had access to the telegraph via Omdurman, while his French counterpart Major Marchand was denied it. The British used this
advantage for a diplomatic stage performance that decisively sapped morale on the French side.
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In other circumstances, the telegraph could also be used for subversive effect. It enabled the coordination of political movements over large areas, as in India in 1908 (or the United States a year earlier), when the virtual community of telegraph operators organized a countrywide strike that crippled administrative and business life from Lahore to Madras and from Karachi to Mandalay. Cables were also an
object
of international (or even intra-imperial) politics. Canada fought for two decades for a Pacific cable that would give it greater freedom and draw it closer to its Western neighbors, while the government in London kept creating new obstacles in order to preserve the classical arrangement whereby peripheral regions communicated with one another via the imperial center only.
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Little technology transfer to newcomers or imitators was involved in the twenty-year-long cabling of the world. Ownership of the hardware and control of know-how remained in the hands of a few inventors and investors.

As for the “old” means of communication, there was a major expansion of letter mail—up from 412 million to 6.8 billion units per annum inside Germany between 1871 and 1913, and by a proportionally similar amount for foreign mail.
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Never had international correspondence been as common as it was in summer 1914. To be sure, it was still by no means the case that mail reached every inhabitant of the planet; services began to thin out even in peripheral areas of Europe. A large part of Russia's rural population had no access to mailboxes or post offices. But the vast expanses of the United States were already thoroughly covered by the eve of the Civil War; communications and literacy drove each other upward in a continual spiral.
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Another new network-creating technology was the electricity supply, which also appeared on the scene in the great watershed decade of the 1880s. Simple prototypes of central electricity stations were in operation from the beginning of the decade, and current transmission over a certain distance between cities became feasible in the early nineties. Networks had to combine the three functions of generation (mainly through waterpower), storage, and transmission of electricity. On the eve of the First World War, technology had matured to the point that systems of regional energy production and distribution were in place virtually all over the world. Urban households were connected to these systems, electricity entered the daily life of the affluent classes, and the electromotor found ever more practical applications in traffic and manufacturing.
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Whereas Britain had pioneered the global telegraph and America the telephone, the world center of electricity was Germany—or rather, Berlin, “the electrical metropolis.”
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Major standardization comparable to that of the early railroads had to wait until after 1914; up to then there was a chaos of different voltages and frequencies, with few electrical networks transcending the confines of individual cities and regions and none crossing national borders. Only in the 1920s did the technical and political conditions exist for extensive energy linkups,
and in 1924 the need for international regulation was made explicit at the first World Energy Conference.

2 Trade

World Market—Regional Markets—Niches
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For a long time the growth of the modern world economy was seen in the West as a spreading of links and contacts out from Europe; the memorable image of the phased development of an expansive “modern world-system” (Immanuel Wallerstein) also served to encourage this. Today, however, it is more plausible to suppose that the emerging world economy of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was polycentric: several different commercial capitalisms flourished simultaneously in different parts of the world, each associated with the rise of production for distant markets.
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European trade dominated the Atlantic and, from the middle of the eighteenth century, pushed back the Asian competition. But it would too simplistic to envisage the world economy, as it was restructured after the 1840s under the aegis of free trade, as a single network spanning the globe.
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The world market is a rather abstract theoretical fiction. Depending on the commodity (which could also be human beings), many markets grew so large that one might describe them as global. But none of these can be separated from its specific geography; none covered the earth in a geometrically even manner.

Regional subsystems retained, or regained, a dynamic of their own. Between 1883 and 1928 trade within Asia grew significantly faster than between Asia and the West;
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and for the most part the differentiation and distribution of economic roles within those regional systems was driven internally, not from Europe or by Europeans. Thus, after 1800—not earlier!—an international rice market developed in Asia: Burma, Siam, and Indochina exported the commodity, while Ceylon, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and China imported it.
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Demand for rice was less an indicator of poverty than a result of regional specialization and, to some extent, higher consumption standards, given that it was seen in all Asian societies as a high-grade cereal comparable to wheat in Europe. The spread of modern technology did not necessarily mean that “premodern” forms of transportation and exchange disappeared from cross-border markets. The junk routes to Southeast Asia from the great port of Canton were by no means a legacy of “traditional” China but resulted directly from the trading monopoly that the Qianlong Emperor had awarded to the city in 1757. Junks did not become obsolete throughout the nineteenth century, any more than Arab dhows did in the Indian Ocean. European ships did not really drive out other vessels except in the transportation of cotton and opium. Trade links with Southeast Asia remained under Chinese control.
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From the point of view of commercial history, the nineteenth century was in many respects a continuation of the early modern period. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, European merchants had already had great success in organizing intercontinental trade across cultural boundaries; the chartered company, especially in Asia, had been a highly efficient innovation, whose later decline was due not so much to shortcomings of its own as to the ideological reservations of ascending liberalism. From the 1870s on, it underwent a modest revival in the colonization of Africa, pioneered by the United African Company (1879). Apart from the great bureaucratic organizations of the East India Company and the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, individual merchants flourished on several continents, the core group in the eighteenth century being the “gentlemanly capitalists” of London and the southern English ports, along with a large contingent of Scots and growing numbers of North Americans. The trading networks into which such people were woven in the age of sailing ships and mercantilism largely anticipated the global commerce of the nineteenth century.
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The internal means and flows of information at their disposal may be described (from the vantage of the cabled world of 1900) as harbingers of modernity: the large trading organizations and the business networks of individual entrepreneurs were held together and kept running by incessant correspondence. They were “empires in writing.”
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To see the nineteenth century only as the age of the industrialism is to overlook the fact that merchants remained the most important force binding the world economy together. In adapting to circumstances and helping to mold them, they connected distant markets and various production regimes, accumulated capital that could flow into banking and industry, and created a need for transnational coordination and regulation leading to new practices of coordination and a body of border-crossing commercial law.