The Media and the Road to Modernity | 93United States as never before. Because of its network character, telegraphy
was declared the ‘Victorian Internet’ (Standage 1998). Yet notwithstanding
its immensely greater speed, caution should be exercised in making such
comparisons: telegraphy at that time was extremely expensive, and available
only to the upper classes on a regular basis. Furthermore, it took several
hours to send messages over longer distances and several days to the Far
East, as transmission through a succession of relay stations was very time
consuming. In any case, short messages sent by telegraph were no substitute
for written correspondence.
Newer studies wrestle with the question of whether telegraphy was pro-
pelled more by nationalistic imperialism or the global economy. Doubtless
the possession of high-speed telegraph lines provided an information advan-
tage for trade and imperial conquests (acc. to Hills 2002). Great Britain in
particular used the telegraph to secure global dominance and owned approx-
imately 68 per cent of the world’s cables in 1900; the United States had
close to 20 per cent, but Germany only 2 per cent, albeit with an upward
tendency (Wobring 2005: 183f.). It took decades before the United States
was able to catch up with Great Britain by expanding its transatlantic cable
system (Hugill 1999: 230).
On the other hand, Dwayne Winseck and Robert M. Pike have recently
argued that global telegraphy was overwhelmingly based on economically
motivated international cooperation (Winseck and Pike 2007). They per-
ceive it more as a force of internationalisation than a struggle for infor-
mation control. Big cable firms like the French Atlantic Cable Company,
the Indo-European Telegraph Company and the Western and Brazilian Tele-
graph Company were in fact financed by capital from several cooperating
nations. Persian and Ottoman firms were even involved in the construction
of the telegraph network between England and India. At the same time,
the various national telegraph companies were major international players,
as Microsoft and Bertelsmann are in today’s phase of globalisation. John
Pender, who established most of the British – and thus worldwide – cable
companies, is accordingly considered the Bill Gates of the late nineteenth
century.
At the same time, it is evident that the various states increasingly
attempted to place the media under state and therefore national control. It
may not come as a surprise that in authoritarian governments like Germany
telegraphy was put under the auspices of the postal service so that telegrams
could be monitored. But even England increasingly turned to the buy-
ing-up of private cables from 1868 onwards, and two years later purchased
the underwater cable to Germany from Reuters (Read 1999: 51). During
the heyday of imperialism between the 1890s and 1910, state control of
the cable networks was especially intense, even in Japan and the United