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Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW Hugill on Deep Kanta Lahiri-Choudhury. _Telegraphic
Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c.1830-1920_
> H-ASIA
> December 21, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig. pub. H-Soz-u-Kult) by Peter Hugill on Deep Kanta
> Lahiri-Choudhury. _Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian
> Empire, c.1830-1920_
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> **********************************************************************
> From: H-Net Reviews:
>
> Deep Kanta Lahiri-Choudhury. Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in
> the Indian Empire, c.1830-1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 277
> S. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-20506-2.
>
> Reviewed by Peter Hugill
> Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (December, 2011)
>
>
> D. K. Lahiri-Choudhury: Telegraphic Imperialism
>
> This is an ambitious book, and as with all ambitious works it both
> fascinates and frustrates. Its ambitions cause the author to sometimes
> take on too much, and the focus of the work slips. Choudhurys work is
> about Empire, science and the technology it enables, and India. It is
> situated at the intersection of science and Empire through the emergence
> in the second half of the Nineteenth Century of electric telegraphy, the
> impact of the New Imperialism on Britains Indian Empire, and the
> centrality of India to the imperial project. Choudhury claims that,
> contrary to the received wisdom that the communications hub of the Empire,
> and thus the command and control center, was securely located in London,
> India acted as a communications hub for the formal and informal Empire
> that developed from Egypt to Australasia in the second half of the
> Nineteenth Century. Choudhury also claims that the increasing velocity and
> volume of information flow caused a series of global information panics
> that became particularly problematic as the 1800s turned to the 1900s.
>
> Although the term New Imperialism came into popular usage in Britain after
> 1880 historians have not generally accepted that there was any real break
> in the process of imperialism during the 1800s. Choudhury argues there was
> something new about imperialism after 1850 and that British popular
> perception was shaped through the experience of the first global
> electronic network (p. 5). One interpretation is that Britain kept
> acquiring territories to ensure its geopolitical security, especially in
> the light of the Great Game against Russia. Choudhury argues that the
> defense of Imperial lines of telegraphic communication was a far greater
> imperative (p. 99) and that the newness of New Imperialism lay not in its
> ideology but its technology (p. 122). Britain came to represent itself as
> a morally superior form of Empire based on rational science and the
> technology it made possible, the cornerstone of which was the telegraph.
> This is a useful corrective to our evolving understanding of the British
> Empire.
>
> Choudhury makes an interesting and convincing argument that the particular
> application of science that allowed, in particular, submarine telegraphy,
> was highly conservative, inasmuch as the central figure of that science,
> William Thomson, conceived of the flow of electrons as akin to a hydraulic
> flow, a fundamentally mechanistic analogy. Regrettably, Choudhury's
> account of the competing technologies ultimately frustrates. Thomson's
> embrace of the mechanistic analogy led him to ignore James Clerk Maxwells
> field theory. This put telegraphy under increasing threat from two
> directions, only one of which Choudhury analyzes. Understanding Maxwell's
> equations would eventually allow Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Lodge, and
> Guilielmo Marconi to apply Maxwellian field theory to wireless telegraphy,
> which in the hands of a Marconi Company armed with Lodge's patents and
> using vacuum tube technology developed by Bell Labs would prove to be a
> much cheaper technology than the submarine cables for imperial
> communications by the 1920s. The consequences of this are ably summarized
> on pages 127-128. Frustratingly, despite the excellent comparison of
> Thomson and Maxwell on pages 125-127, Maxwell's name is not in the index.
> Missing entirely is the attack upon terrestrial telegraphy mounted by the
> telephone. The first American to fully understand and apply Maxwellian
> field theory in telecommunications was the marvelously named John Stone
> Stone at Bell Labs, who provided the scientific basis to fulfill Bell
> Telephones push after 1900 to expand to true long distance telephony using
> first line loading then, by 1915, vacuum tube amplifiers to achieve
> transcontinental service.
>
> So where, and how, did India fit into the New Empire, especially in the
> aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, which forced the ouster of the East India
> Company and the imposition of direct rule. Here is one of the strengths of
> Choudhury's book, drawing as it does on Indian as well as British sources.
> At the same time the authors assumption that the reader will have a deep
> knowledge of Indian history and politics is challenging to all but
> Indianists. Choudhury gives us a fascinating account of the development of
> Indian terrestrial telegraphy before the Mutiny, and debunks the popular
> historical understanding that the British were able to use that network to
> mount an effective resistance to the Mutiny. The technology developed in
> India was unique and ultimately seriously flawed. The pre-Mutiny network
> was also unique in that it was entirely unrelated to railroad
> construction. In Europe and, especially, the United States of America the
> telegraph emerged as first the handmaiden of the railroads and then the
> conveyor of financial information, allowing the emergence of national and
> global futures markets, initially for agricultural products, the first
> based on Chicago, the second on London. In India the telegraph was truly a
> tool of the imperial state rather than of commerce, and once that pattern
> was established it tended to persist through such policies as requiring
> transmissions only in English. Choudhury makes clear, however, that Indian
> merchants, especially those in the financially important opium trade, were
> often able to subvert such policies. Certainly one cannot argue against
> his (re)positioning of India as central to the British imperial structures
> of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries rather than merely a
> puppet. The Direct Rule imposed after the Mutiny tended to be a concept
> very much lost in translation, however hard British proconsuls may have
> tried. India continued to have one of the worlds largest armies, and even
> though that army often came to Britain's aid, such as in various colonial
> wars of the late 1800s and in the Middle East during World War One, it was
> scarcely under full British control.
>
> The peculiar contribution of this book for this reviewer lies in the
> understanding that the Empire followed the telegraph as much as the
> telegraph followed the British flag (p. 91). In a Nineteenth Century
> economy still heavily dependent on the output of the organic world
> Britain's logical concerns were food, agricultural raw materials for
> industry, such as cotton, and markets for its industrial products and
> financial services. But the world economy was turning by 1900 to one more
> focused on other flows: as Choudhury notes the telegraph provided a field
> and context in which newer strategic imperatives such as control over
> petroleum emerged toward the close of the nineteenth century (p. 82). The
> telegraph was important to the New Imperialism of the late 1800s but it is
> also an important model for the management of the unstated imperial
> projects of the late 1900s and early 2000s.
>
> Two sections seemed poorly related to the book, if fascinating: Chapter 7
> on the Telegraph General Strike of 1908; and the material on information
> panics. Clearly the Strike is of great interest and Choudhury's claim that
> the telegraphists formed an early virtual community is provocative. Given
> the claims made by Choudhury with regard to the role of information panics
> in accelerating geopolitical instability in the late 1800s they deserve to
> be the subject of a book by themselves.
>
>
>
> If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it
> through the list discussion logs at:
> http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
>
> Citation: Peter Hugill. Review of Lahiri-Choudhury, Deep Kanta,
> Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire,
> c.1830-1920. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. December, 2011.
> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34950
>
> Copyright 2011 by H-Net, Clio-online, and the author, all rights
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