The Telegraph and the Re-Wiring of Empire and Colony

The telegraph did not simply speed up communication — it rewired the relationship between center and periphery, making it possible for London to govern Calcutta, Cairo, and Cape Town in something approaching real time. Before the telegraph, colonial administrators operated with weeks or months of autonomy between dispatches. After it, orders could arrive within hours, tightening imperial control to an unprecedented degree. The British Empire was, in a meaningful sense, a telegraph empire — its network of undersea cables was explicitly designed to connect colonial outposts to the metropole while bypassing rival powers.

In the Ottoman Empire, the telegraph arrived in the 1850s and was rapidly adopted for both military coordination and administrative centralization. Sultan Abdülhamid II used the telegraph network to monitor provincial governors, suppress dissent, and project authority across a vast and diverse territory. But the technology was double-edged: the same wires that carried imperial orders also carried the communications of reform movements and, eventually, the Young Turk revolutionaries who would use the telegraph infrastructure to coordinate the 1908 constitutional revolution.

The parallels to contemporary digital infrastructure are structural, not merely metaphorical. Today’s undersea fiber-optic cables follow many of the same routes as the Victorian telegraph cables, and they are owned and controlled by a similarly small number of powerful entities — now corporations rather than empires. The data flowing through these cables is subject to surveillance, censorship, and geopolitical contestation, just as telegraph messages were intercepted and decoded by rival powers.

When we talk about the “digital divide” or the geography of internet access, we are talking about patterns of connection and exclusion that were established in the age of the telegraph. Who controls the infrastructure of global communication? Whose messages move freely, and whose are intercepted? The telegraph reminds us that the politics of connectivity are always also the politics of power.