Imperial Designs – Remaking the Institutions of Global Communications
Project Code: ARC DP1095061
This is a three-year research collaboration from 2010-12 between Australian and overseas scholars exploring the trans-national, co-operative arrangements for global telecommunications in the British Commonwealth from World War Two until the liberalization of the 1980s and 90s, and the economics and politics of post-war submarine cable projects.
Research Team
Chief Investigators: Jock Given (Swinburne), Richard Collins (Open University)
Research Fellows: Ian Martin
Publications and Other Research Outputs
 Publications
Audio Visual Material
Media Coverage
Context
British dominance of submarine cables in the late 19th century provided ‘one of the clearest illustrations of Victorian hegemony’. In the first half of the 20th century, Britain persevered with an ‘All-Red’ network spanning the seas without touching territories that did not answer to its sovereign. This project aims to understand more about what happened in the second half of the century, as the assumptions about a trans-national British political, economic and cultural community unraveled, but the institutional structures they had produced remained. Conceived and nurtured in an era of imperial globalization, the international telecommunications structures of former British territories were re-ordered as this era gave way to state-based regimes and sometimes faltering regional turns―Australia and New Zealand to each other and to Asia, Britain to Europe, Canada to North America, India to Asia, South Africa to Africa.
Research Programme
Extensive archival research in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa and the UK will focus on the evolving governance of this network and the ideologies informing relationships between the enterprises and governments that ran it. This economic, business and political history will be linked to the contemporary challenges of sustaining and governing global communications institutions.
Project Outcomes
Monographs and articles will be written for international business and media history and telecommunications journals about the post-war Commonwealth scheme and more recent international submarine cable consortia, targeted especially at the communications industry, equities analysts and funds managers.
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