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The Telegraph from Below: Race, Labour and the Indo-European Telegraph Department 1862–1927

Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: I gave the signal, passed the word for double wages, and down came the Arabs like a volley of grape. Into the water they plunged, and at last seized the looked-for cable. They slipped – they floundered – but kept bravely at work; till a heavy thunderstorm came on, which seemed to shake them in their resolution.1 In describing the landing of the Indo-European telegraph cable at Faw in 1862, the future British Director of the Indo-European Telegraph Department (IETD), Frederic Goldsmid, offers a glimpse of the labourers building the network and of British attitudes to such work. The collective energy of the ‘Arabs’ is compared to a ‘volley of grape’, mechanistically directed under the discharge of a European as they industriously haul the submarine cable to land until shaken by a thunderstorm. Such oblique descriptions of subalterns and their centrality to telegraph infrastructure are seldom glimpsed in existing work on the subject, which has principally focused on the ‘high’ diplomatic politics of telegraph networks. This paper begins to redress this gap by looking at the IETD from below, analysing workers in the operations, maintenance, security, and expansion of the telegraph network. In doing so, the paper traces the emergence of an official racialized taxonomy for organizing signallers in the Department soon after the IETD was reorganized under the Director General of Telegraphs in India. Despite continuous attempts to control, discipline and shape employees through racialization, the paper argues that these workers were able to influence conditions through collective and individual agency. Rather than understanding imperial telegraph networks as simply a ‘tool of empire’, reading the IETD network from below reveals it as an inescapably hybrid enterprise, embedded in and reliant on local spaces, individuals, and communities.
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbae009
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4403780424
FWCI: 2.717
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Cited by: 2
Related to: 10