Simone M. Müller

The Telegraph and the Bank: On the Interdependence of Global Communications and Capitalism, 1866-1914

This article uses the example of submarine telegraphy to trace the interdependence between global communications and modern capitalism. It uncovers how cable entrepreneurs created the global telegraph network based upon particular understandings of cross-border trade, while economists such as John Maynard Keynes and John Hobson saw global communications as the foundation for capitalist exchange. Global telegraphic networks were constructed to support extant capitalist systems until the 1890s, when states and corporations began to lay telegraph cables to open up new markets, particularly in Asia and Latin America, as well as for strategic and military reasons. The article examines how the interaction between telegraphy and capitalism created particular geographical spaces and social orders despite opposition from myriad Western and non-Western groups. It argues that scholars need to account for the role of infrastructure in creating asymmetrical information and access to trade that have continued to the present day.

Editorial: Communicating Global Capitalism

On 6 October 1913, the news of Colonel James E. Tate’s suicide hit the front page of the New York Times. The newspaper blamed a rather strange phenomenon – the rise of the parcel post. Tate, ‘formerly a capitalist’, had held substantial stock in private express companies. Such companies were the only means to deliver parcels in the US before January 1913, when the US Postal Service introduced parcel post. Parcel post became wildly popular: approximately 300 million parcels were sent in the first six months of operation. As shares in private express companies plummeted, Tate suffered heavy financial losses. While he left no evidence of his motives, the Times headline delivered the verdict that Tate had committed suicide because he had been ‘hit by parcel post’. Had shares in communications companies killed the capitalist? Six years later, Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist, offered a rather different interpretation. He claimed that even suicides such as Tate’s merely represented another potential source of profit for newspapers seeking to sell copies. Newspapers’ sensationalist depictions of deaths seemed to Sinclair ‘typical of the capitalistic mind, which is so frugal that it extracts profit even from the suicide of its victims’. Even worse, the New York Times had only spun Tate’s death as suicide caused by parcel post because the paper supported private express companies as part of New York’s ‘political and financial machine’, as Sinclair put it.

Umwelt- und Klimapolitik: Lokale Interessen und globale Verantwortung

Der folgende Beitrag gibt Einblick in die Umweltpolitik als eines der innovativsten Politikfelder in den USA. In Zeiten von divided government lassen sich sowohl der Neue Pragmatismus wie auch der Neue Foderalismus deutlich nachzeichnen. Trotz Reformstaus auf nationaler Ebene, sowie groser Zuruckhaltung mit Blick auf internationale Abkommen werden auf lokaler und bundesstaatlicher Ebene wegweisende Losungen fur Umweltprobleme gesucht und gefunden. Nach einer Einfuhrung zu den wichtigsten Akteure der US-amerikanischen Umweltpolitik und ihren Aufgaben, folgt ein historischer Uberblick seit den 1970er Jahren. Hier zeigt sich die stete Aushandlung zwischen Zentralstaat und Einzelstaaten wie auch zwischen Umweltkonservativen und Reformern. Zuletzt greift der Artikel die wichtigsten Themen fur die Zukunft der US-amerikanischen Umweltpolitik auf.

Telegraphy and the “New Woman” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe

This article explores the history of telegraphy in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of class and gender. It brings together approaches from social history and the history of finance with communication studies. The article demonstrates that our understanding of telegraphy as a masculine undertaking in terms of science, technology, and technology-in-use needs to be expanded. Contemporary discourses of telegraphy included practices of exclusion for the woman engineer and the female telegraph user based on constructions of femininity as “the other.” Yet, telegraphy also afforded women new avenues of independence, which resulted in an expansion of the domestic sphere. Middle-class women in particular used the opportunities telegraphy offered as a means for employment as a female telegraph clerk or investment in telegraph shares. At the end of the nineteenth century, telegraphy thus helped the “new woman” carve out a new social geography for herself.