Roland Wenzlhuemer

The dematerialization of telecommunication: communication centres and peripheries in Europe and the world, 1850–1920

Interregional communication has been a key constituent of the process of globalization since its very origins. For most of its history, information has moved between world regions and along the routes according to the rationales established by interregional trade and migration. The dematerialization of telecommunication in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century eventually detached long-distance information transmission from transport and transformed the global communication structure. New communication centres (and new peripheries) emerged. Some regions moved closer to the global data stream than others. It is still unclear how such different degrees of global connectivity impacted on local development. This essay contributes to the identification and valuation of global communication centres and peripheries in order to provide suitable candidates for future case studies. To this end, statistical data on the development of domestic telegraph networks in selected countries has been analysed and interpreted. In a second step, Social Network Analysis methods have been employed to measure the centrality of almost three hundred cities and towns in the European telecommunication network of the early twentieth century.

From Coffee to Tea Cultivation in Ceylon, 1880-1900: An Economic and Social History

In the early 1880s a disastrous plant disease diminished the yields of the hitherto flourishing coffee plantation of Ceylon. Coincidentally, world market conditions for coffee were becoming increasingly unfavourable. The combination of these factors brought a swift end to coffee cultivation in the British crown colony and pushed the island into a severe economic crisis. When Ceylon re-emerged from this crisis only a decade later, its economy had been thoroughly transformed and now rested on the large-scale cultivation of tea. This book uses the unprecedented intensity and swiftness of this process to highlight the socioeconomic interconnections and dependencies in tropical export economies in the late nineteenth century and it shows how dramatically Ceylonese society was affected by the economic transformation.

Indian Labour Immigration and British Labour Policy in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon

During most of the nineteenth century, the economy of the British crown colony Ceylon depended almost exclusively on the export of plantation products. After modest beginnings in the 1820s and 1830s, coffee cultivation spread on the island in the 1840s. During the 1880s, the coffee plantations were superseded by plantations of a new crop—tea. Both cultivation systems were almost pure export monocultures, and both relied almost exclusively on imported wage labour from South India. Thus, it is surprising that labour immigration—a process vital to the efficient functioning of the plantation economy—received practically no government attention for the better part of the nineteenth century. Migration between South India and Ceylon was free of government control, support or regulation. Instead, certain functional equivalents—such as the kangany system—organised immigration and coordinated supply and demand. Only very late in the century, when the kangany system had revealed a number of dramatic organisational weaknesses, the Ceylon Government started to get directly involved in labour and immigration policy. The author can be contacted at roland.wenzlhuemer@staff.hu-berlin.de

Editorial – being in transit: ships and global incompatibilities

‘Where was the nineteenth century?’ asks Jürgen Osterhammel in his magnum opus, The transformation of the world. It was to be found, he says, in the European ‘discoveries’ of new lands, in the naming of the world, in the ‘mental maps’ of how the world’s regions were imagined to be interconnected, and in the relationship between the land and the sea. In the articles that make up this special issue, we argue that the critical sites of the nineteenth century, broadly defined, were the phenomena that connected these discoveries, mental maps, world regions, and the land and the sea: ships. Ocean-crossing ships are at once obvious yet obscure candidates for the title of quintessential nineteenth-century lieux d’histoire. Their significance is obvious in the sense that they played such a fundamental role in the geopolitical transformation of the world and in its ‘shrinking’ or its so-called ‘great acceleration’. Ships are of obvious historical importance, too, because they were always more than just material objects, especially when (again in the age of steam) their construction necessitated labour regimes and complex structures of finance that were industrial and capitalist phenomena in themselves. But their obscurity lies in the fact that, despite their centrality to the literature of ‘global’ or ‘world’ history, ships as historical

The ship, the media, and the world: conceptualizing connections in global history

The study of transregional connections is central to the field of global history. This article reflects on the idea of connections from a conceptual viewpoint and treats them as mediators. This will be exemplified by studying the spatial and temporal dimensions of transoceanic steamship passages. The lives of crew and passengers did not go on ‘stand-by’ during such a passage. The case of the flight and eventual capture of Hawley Harvey Crippen will serve as a case in point. Suspected of murder in London, Crippen tried to escape to North America by transatlantic steamer. The captain, however, recognized the fugitive and informed both authorities and media. The ship, whose movements across the Atlantic contributed to the establishment of global connections, thus became tightly entangled in a global media landscape, with newspapers and readers from all over the globe focusing their attention on the small shipboard community. Simultaneously, the steamer became a profoundly secluded place for its passengers, who were cut off from the media flurry surrounding them. The article shifts the principal perspective of the murder case from a terracentric notion of history to a more sea-based narrative. It offers a new historical interpretation of the events and at the same time reconsiders the analytical concept of connections in a broader historical context.

Introduction – Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-sited Reading of Image Flows

“(T)ransculture – the violent collision of an extant culture with a new or different culture that reshapes both into a hybrid transculture that is itself then subject to transculturation – highlights those places where the carefully defined borders of identity become confused and overlapping, a task that requires new histories, new ideas and new means of representation” (Nicholas Mirzoeff 2002 (1998): 477)

Introduction: The Nation State and Beyond. Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The history of globalisation is anything but a no-frills affair that moves smoothly along a clear-cut, unidirectional path of development and eventually leads to seamless global integration. Consequently, scholarship in the social sciences increasingly argued against equating the history of globalisation processes and transcultural entanglements with the master narrative of the gradual homogenisation of the world. A strong common ground these concepts share is the objective of transcending the national as an analytical category and replacing it by focusing on interaction and flows, transfers, and exchanges as the core categories in the study of history. Examining the shifting patterns of global connections has, therefore, become the main challenge for all those who seek to understand the past, the present, and the future of modern societies. And this challenge includes finding a place for the nation state—a form of social organisation that no longer seem to fit into the new analytical framework despite its obvious historical and current significance. Against this background, the introductory chapter argues that the authors assembled in the volume suggest another reading of the role and significance of the nation state in the development of the modern world. The studies presented here argue that looking at the nation state from the perspective of global entanglements gives way to its interpretation as a dynamic and multi-layered structure that partakes in globalisation processes and plays different and at times even contradictory roles at the same time. Accordingly, it is not the nation state that ceases to exist, due to increasing processes of global exchange, but a certain perspective on the nation state which can no longer be upheld.

GeoTwain: Geospatial analysis and visualization for researchers of transculturality

In our research cluster on transculturality many projects deal with georeferenced data. This paper offers an introduction to the new project GeoTwain that works on visualisation techniques for such data. Based on an analysis of the global telegraph network as an example of transcultural research using geo-referenced data, the paper derives user requirements by combining experiences gained from previous projects and specifies a set of solutions. It is the aim of GeoTwain to provide easy visualization of 4-D-information based on Google Earth and to grasp spatial relationships embedded in historical evidence to analyse, recombine and disaggregate geo-referenced historical data without having to use more specialized and highly complex GIS Tools. Envisioned visualization with GeoTwain allows for fast and efficient assessment of georeferencings analytical potential in any given case; it also allows the user to carefully weigh further investments in data enrichment in relation to expected findings. Both the development and application of GeoTwain are embedded in the broader research environment infrastructure called Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA).

GeoTwain: Geospatial Analysis and Visualisation for Researchers in Transcultural Studies

In our research cluster on transculturality many projects deal with georeferenced data. This paper offers an introduction to the new project GeoTwain that works on visualization techniques for such data. Based on an analysis of the global telegraph network as an example of transcultural research using georeferenced data, the paper derives user requirements by combining experiences gained from previous projects and specifies a set of solutions. It is the aim of GeoTwain to provide easy visualization of 4-Dinformation based on Google Earth and to grasp spatial relationships embedded in historical evidence to analyse, recombine and disaggregate geo-referenced historical data without having to use more specialized and highly complex GIS Tools. Envisioned visualization with GeoTwain allows for fast and efficient assessment of georeferencing’s analytical potential in any given case; it also allows the user to carefully weigh further investments in data enrichment in relation to expected findings. Both the development and application of GeoTwain are embedded in the broader research environment infrastructure called Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA).