Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016)

New Books in Technology · Jul 10, 2017 · 54m

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in the nineteenth century and the battles over them in the subsequent decades. Her book shows how expanding telegraph networks were instrumental in processes of capitalism, nation-building, and globalization. To track these grand developments, however, Muller reconstructs the network of people who built, managed, and fought over telegraph networks. She calls this eclectic collection of financiers…