Simon J. Potter

Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century British Empire

W have of late been encouraged to think of Britain’s imperial past in terms of “webs” and “networks.” Scholars of contemporary globalization, seeking precedent for current perceived trends, have used these labels to describe how different parts of the British Empire were linked together during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They argue that the mass media played a particularly significant role in sustaining such patterns of interconnection and, as a result, in forging transnational identities. According to this interpretation, new communications technologies such as telegraphs and submarine telegraph cables allowed news and opinion to be disseminated more rapidly and more freely. Subsequently, this interpretation maintains, radio and television came to act as an even more powerful media of transnational communication, encouraging people to think of themselves as members of global communities. Historians of the British Empire have recently also begun to write about webs and networks and to discuss the role of the mass media in creating imperial communities. In particular, historians of the early nineteenth century have shown how groups of white settlers used newspapers to communicate information and opinion to audiences in Britain and other parts of the empire. Some of these historians argue that, in the process, settlers rehearsed claims to membership in a global British community and discussed ideas about the nature of “Britishness.” As will be discussed below, in deploying a “networked conception” scholars of globali-

Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British world, 1922-1970

Introduction 1. Diversity, 1922-31 2. Discord, 1932-35 3. Integration, 1935-39 4. War, 1939-45 5. Continuities, 1945-59 6. Challenges, 1945-59 7. Disintegration? 1960-70 Conclusions

Communication and integration: The British and dominions press and the British world, c.1876–1914

At the Second Imperial Press Conference, held in Ottawa in 1920, the proprietor of the London Daily Telegraph, Lord Burnham, declared that, ‘The British world is a world of its own, and it is a world of many homes.’ Burnham used the idea of a British world to reconcile the diverse regional, national and imperial perspectives that characterised the early twentiethcentury British Empire. As is now being recognised, the concept also offers historians a means of moving beyond the confines of national histories, without returning to an older, equally restrictive imperial historiography. Few contemporaries, however, used the term ‘British world’ with any precision. Historians who wish to employ the idea are therefore faced with a complex problem of definition and delineation. One of the purposes of the conferences of which this volume is a product is thus to identify and investigate the characteristics of the British world. Another is to explore how far its component parts were effectively integrated into a coherent whole. While this agenda is extremely broad in nature and geographical scope, an examination of the power relationships that bound together Britain and the settler colonies (or Dominions) – military, economic and demographic – provides us with a preliminary view of the nature of the British world, and also of its limits. In military terms, members of the British world struck an implicit bargain in the mid-Victorian period according to which defence arrangements would be drawn into a coherent, overarching imperial strategy. Each member would contribute to the master plan rather than give priority to local defence. However, by the late nineteenth century, the future of this arrangement was increasingly in doubt. Admiral Sir John Fisher’s policy of concentrating the Fleet in ‘home’ waters brought into question the extent to which Britain would be able to honour its part of the bargain and protect the Dominions from attack and invasion. As the settler colonies thus began to move towards participation in naval defence, a new dilemma became apparent. Would they provide ships for the Royal Navy, or construct

British Imperial History

Introduction 1. Expansion and Contraction 2. Control 3. Difference 4. Identity 5. Going Global Conclusions Glossary Notes Further Reading Index

Jingoism, Public Opinion, and the New Imperialism: Newspapers and imperial rivalries at the fin de siècle

This essay analyses late-Victorian understandings of the relationship between the press, imperial diplomacy, and popular enthusiasm for empire, and examines how newspapers explained their own role in the imperial rivalries of the 1890s. During imperial disputes between Britain and France (particularly the Fashoda crisis) and between Britain and the USA (the Venezuela boundary dispute) contemporaries claimed that self-interested ‘jingo’ elements of the political elite had sought to foment conflict by manipulating ‘public opinion’, but had been defeated by statesmen (who had used the press for legitimate diplomatic purposes) and by ‘the people’ (who were averse to war). This contrasted with contemporary comments about the role played by the press in provoking wars between the USA and Spain and between Britain and the Transvaal: both the press and the people seemed to succumb to an irrational popular ‘jingoism’, and to sweep statesmen along in their wake. However, this essay argues that these contemporary verdicts about the role of newspapers in focusing popular imperialism have been too easily accepted by historians. During the imperial rivalries of the 1890s the press played an important role as a medium of transnational communication, but did not push statesmen into expansionism.

Social histories of the media in Britain and Ireland

Asa Briggs and Peter Burke’s Social History of the Media is now in its third edition: it is a good moment to think about what a social history of the media should actually look like. How we do this depends on how we define social history. For Raphael Samuel, social history was primarily the history of ordinary people. It was a form of history that engaged with contemporary social issues and had a clear social purpose. According to Samuel’s definition, social history ‘touches on, and arguably helps to focus, major issues of public debate, as for example on British national character or the nature of family life. It mobilises popular enthusiasm and engages popular passions’. (Samuel 42) Eric Hobsbawm has argued, in somewhat different terms, that one of the defining features of social history is its all-encompassing ambition. Rather than plough a narrow, ultra-specialised furrow, social historians cultivate the widest field possible. They aim to write ‘‘‘total’’ or ‘‘global’’ history . . . to integrate the contributions of all relevant social sciences in history’ (Hobsbawm 99). Samuel and Hobsbawm were themselves key protagonists in the development of social history, which emerged as a powerful force shaping the wider discipline of history in the 1960s and 1970s. Invigorated by social protest movements and radical politics, social history helped reorient history as a subject both inside and outside academia. Strongly influenced by Marxist theory and by concepts and methods borrowed from the social sciences, it drove historians away from their traditional political, diplomatic and constitutional pastures. Historians now worked with new source materials, trying to find the voices of the less powerful, and the powerless, and to relate social inequality and protest to underlying economic and class relations.

Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century

Mir Dast, VC, to make a request, he replied a wounded soldier should not be sent back to the trenches. There were other complaints. Flogging was reintroduced for sepoys just as it was being phased out in the British army. Restrictions on off-time movement and socialising compared unfavourably with French generosity towards Algerians. Some letters suggest greater risks were taken with Indian lives. Nor were all Indians in uniform mercenaries. Some were outstandingly heroic. An ace pilot, 19-year-old Indra Lal (Laddie) Roy, achieved 10 ‘kills’ before the Germans shot him down in flames in France on 22 July 1918. German troops collected and buried his remains near Arras, where the grave carries an inscription in Bengali whose translation means ‘A valiant warrior’s grave; respect it, do not touch it’. The German fighter pilot Baron Manfred von Richtofen had a wreath dropped on the spot where Roy fell. He was the only Indian to receive a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross. The full human saga of India’s wartime activities has yet to be told. Meanwhile, it is not surprising that Indians and British should cross swords in an historians’ war over the war to end all wars.

Ireland and the New Journalism

We have never before known so much about the history of the newspaper and periodical press in Ireland. Over the last decade (stimulated in part by a series of conferences held under the auspices of...

Invasion by the Monster”: transnational influences on the establishment of ABC television, 1945-1956

This article explores links between the debates that surrounded the introduction of television in Australia, and parallel controversies in Britain, the USA and Canada. Richard Boyer, chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), looked for evidence of how these other places had experienced television to support his case for an Australian public television monopoly financed without advertising. For Boyer and many ABC colleagues, British regulatory practices and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television were the model for emulation. Boyer also hoped that public broadcasting would sustain Australias Britishness, and deter broader American cultural influences. Canada potentially showed how British and American approaches might be reshaped to suit Australian circumstances. However, as the strength of US broadcasting influence became apparent, as the limits of the response of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to the television challenge were revealed, and as Britain itself adopted a ‘dual system’ of public and commercial broadcasting, the ABC found its position in the Australian television debate progressively and inexorably undermined. Transnational connections thus failed to serve the ABCs particular national agenda.

Roundtable : Vision of the press in Britain, 1850-1950. By Mark Hampton Urbana and Chicago : the University of Illinois Press, 2004. (pp. 218. ISBN 0-252-02946-1.

Visions is a valuable and stimulating contribution to the history of the press and the history of ideas about the press. Taken as a whole, it provides a convincing account of the existence of separate emphases in public discourse about the press across a century. The mid-Victorian optimism about the educative potential of the press, in this account, contrasts clearly with the range of less positive assessments that are current in the interwar years of 1918 /1939. The complexity of perspectives on the press is stressed throughout and the argument does justice to the idea that it is a series of shifts in emphasis more than sharp breaks in elite perspectives of the press, which are being tracked. No reader of the book can fail to be impressed by the range and suggestiveness of the material used to construct the argument. Visions stimulates a number of considerations, most strikingly about the problems of writing a history of ideas about the press. Writing the history of ideas throws up problems of method which impinge directly on the story told, and make writing the history of ideas, especially of ideas about the press, a significant challenge. Is the object of study the evolution of key concepts across time as developed by significant thinkers? In Visions this is not the case. Is it an attempt, as Quentin Skinner suggests, ‘to interpret specific beliefs by placing them in the context of other beliefs, to interpret systems of belief by placing them in wider intellectual frameworks, and to understand those broader frameworks by viewing them in the light of the longue durée’ (4 /5)? Visions does not attempt this, partly because the materials available are so extensive and not really very systematic, and the intention of the book is more synoptic. The method in Visions is to identify a range of areas where the press was discussed (newspapers, periodicals, speeches, books, pamphlets, government papers) and to explore shifts in the dominant perspectives across time, relating them generally, but purposefully and appropriately, to change in the economy, the press industry, education and the size and composition of the electorate. Yet the sheer range of material covered and the length of the period considered poses challenges. One of these challenges concerns deciding which views are to be privileged in any account. Visions chooses the ‘elite’ as an organizing concept, self-consciously side-stepping the use of ‘class’ (Hampton, 4 /5). Yet defining an ‘elite’ is as difficult a task as defining and using ‘class’. In the period 1850 /1950 covered by Visions the question of what were the