Webs, networks, and systems: Globalization and the mass media in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British empire

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 621-646

  Potter, Simon J ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42549090199     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/515446     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 91
2. Richard Price, "One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire and Their Imperial Culture," Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2006): 602-27, esp. 607-9
3. The Newspaper Press Directory (London, 1857), 8
4. This Is the CBC: Your National Radio System (n.p.: n.d., ca. 1946)
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London, 1991), 35
6. Anderson built on the arguments deployed by Marshall McLuhan in, e.g., The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London, 1962)
7. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge, 1995), 8
8. See ibid., particularly 4-13, 26, 32-36, 75
9. For an earlier discussion of the transnational role of the media, see Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950)
10. For a fascinating example of this, see Su Lin Lewis, "Echoes of Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Penang's 'Indigenous' English Press," in Media and the British Empire, ed. Chandrika Kaul (Basingstoke, 2006), 233-49
11. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge, 1999), 1-27, 327-35, quotes at 15, 19
12. Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London, 1997), 12
13. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers (London, 1998). The idea of dynamic and fluid networks of interconnection has also been deployed in work on past and present advocacy campaigns. See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1998)
14. See, e.g., Anthony G. Hopkins, "Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History," Past and Present, no. 164 (August 1999): 198-243
15. and C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Oxford, 2004)
16. Tony Ballantyne, "Rereading the Archive and Opening Up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond)," in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC, 2003), 104
17. For earlier work touching on links between different sites of colonization, and between Ireland and India in particular, see, e.g., Clive Dewey, "Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival: Historicist Implications of Gladstone's Irish and Scottish Land Acts, 1870-1886," Past and Present, no. 64 (August 1974): 30-70
18. and S. B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993)
19. Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2002), quotes at 12 and 195
20. Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London, 2001), 6-8
21. Alan Lester, "British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire," History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 25
22. See also Alan Lester, "Historical Geographies of British Colonization: New South Wales, New Zealand and the Cape in the Early Nineteenth Century," in Imperial Communication: Australia, Britain and the British Empire, ed. Simon J. Potter (London, 2005), 91-120
23. Alan Lester, "Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire," History Compass 4, no. 1 (January 2006): 124-41, quote at 124
24. It has also been argued that the idea of networks can usefully be applied to eighteenth-century imperial history (Natasha Glaisyer, "Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire," Historical Journal 47, no. 2 [2004]: 451-76)
25. For another very specific case study that uses the idea of imperial networks, see Jennifer Ridden, "Britishness as an Imperial and Diasporic Identity: Irish Elite Perspectives, c. 1820-1870s," in Victoria's Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901, ed. Peter Gray (Dublin, 2004), 88-105
26. Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c. 1780-1850 (London, 1949)
27. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855-1914 (London, 1980), 49-54
28. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, "Introduction," in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge, 2002), 3-4
29. Damen Ward, "Colonial Communication: Creating Settler Public Opinion in Crown Colony South Australia and New Zealand," in Potter, Imperial Communication, 7-46
30. Jean K. Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (London, 1998), 9-31
31. Hannah Barker, "England, 1760-1815," in Barker and Burroughs, Press, Politics and the Public Sphere, 94
32. J. Saxon Mills, The Press and Communications of the Empire (London, 1924), 103
33. J. Paul Thomas, "The British Empire and the Press" (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1982), 107
34. Francis Williams, Dangerous Estate: The Anatomy of Newspapers (London, 1959), 102
35. Stephen Manning, "Foreign News Gathering and Reporting in the London and Devon Press: The Anglo-Zulu War, 1879, a Case Study" (D.Phil. thesis, Exeter University 2005), 52
36. Simon J. Potter, "Empire and the English Press, c. 1857-1914," in Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857-1921, ed. Simon J. Potter (Dublin, 2004), 39-61
37. Manning, "Foreign News Gathering," 174-77
38. Peter Putnis, "The British Transoceanic Steamship Press in Nineteenth-Century India andAustralia: An Overview," Journal of Australian Studies (forthcoming)
39. Potter, "Empire and the English Press," 43-47
40. Peter Putnis, "The Indian Uprising of 1857 as a Global Media Event" (paper presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Cairo, July 2006)
41. See also Jill C. Bender, "Mutiny or Freedom Fight? The 1857 Indian Mutiny and the Irish Press," in Potter, Newspapers and Empire, 92-108
42. Lee, Origins of the Popular Press, 54-63
43. Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985)
44. Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, 32-52
45. Brian P. N. Beaven, "Partnership, Patronage, and the Press in Ontario, 1880-1914
46. Myths and Realities," Canadian Historical Review 64, no. 3 (September 1983): 317-51
47. Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890-1920 (Montreal, 1997)
48. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, "Introduction," in Periodicals of Queen Victoria's Empire: An Exploration, ed. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (Toronto, 1996), 10
49. Henry Mayer, The Press in Australia (Melbourne, 1964), 188-90
50. Guy H. Scholefield, Newspapers in New Zealand (Wellington, 1958), 1-21
51. Patrick Day, The Making of the New Zealand Press: A Study of the Organizational and Political Concerns of New Zealand Newspaper Controllers, 1840-1880 (Wellington, 1990), 4-5, 116-36
52. For the impact of these changes on British thinking about the role of the press in politics and society, see Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 (Urbana, IL, 2004)
53. R. A. Scott James, The Influence of the Press (London, 1913), 218
54. "Cable Press Rates," Manchester Guardian, 1 July 1909
55. Richard Jebb to Sandford Fleming, 7 June 1905, Sandford Fleming Papers, 24/173, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Ottawa
56. Richard Jebb to Alfred Deakin, 23 May 1907, Alfred Deakin Papers, 1/1686, National Library of Australia (NLA), Canberra
57. Fabian Ware to Deakin, 22 May 1907, 7/40, Deakin Papers, NLA
58. See Simon J. Potter, "Richard Jebb, John S. Ewart, and the Round Table, 1898-1926," English Historical Review 122, no. 495 (February 2007): 105-32
59. Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Terhi Rantanen, eds., The Globalization of News (London, 1998), 1-5
60. Donald Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1999), 49, 55-65
61. see also Read, "Reuters: News Agency of the British Empire," Contemporary Record 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 195-212
62. Peter Putnis, "Reuters in Australia: The Supply and Exchange of News, 1859-1877," Media History 10, no. 2 (August 2004): 67-88
63. and "How the International News Agency Business Model Failed-Reuters in Australia, 1877-1895," Media History 12, no. 1 (April 2006): 1-17
64. Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (Oxford, 2003), 87-105
65. Potter, News and the British World, 142-50
66. Lester, "Imperial Circuits and Networks," 134-35
67. Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815-1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005), 5
68. Herman and McChesney, The Global Media. The terms "webs" and "system" are also used to describe relationships among book publishers and sellers, "purity activists," and censorship authorities in Deana Heath, "Purity, Obscenity and the Making of an Imperial Censorship System," in Kaul, Media and the British Empire, 160-73
69. C. M. Bell to L. S. Amery, 27 October 1899, MLB22/289-90, Times Newspapers Limited Archives, London;
70. Gerald Shaw, Some Beginnings: The Cape Times, 1876-1910 (Cape Town, 1975), 110
71. H. Currey to J. A. Hobson, 27 September 1899, 122/155
72. and J. E. Taylor to C. P. Scott, 15 February 1900, 130/114, both in Manchester Guardian archive, University of Manchester, John Ryland's Library, Manchester
73. W. H. Atack to Cape Times, 18 January 1900
74. and Atack to A. J. Fraser, 25 January 1900, both in New Zealand Press Association archive, box 78, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga O Aotearoa, Wellington, New Zealand
75. Manning, "Foreign News Gathering," 5, 192
76. This tendency drove, for example, the New World Information and Communication Order campaign of the 1970s. See Herman and McChesney, The Global Media, 22-25. We should not assume, however, that print was not used by indigenous peoples to pursue their own interests
77. See Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 146-68
78. Alex Nalbach, "'The Software of Empire': Telegraphic News Agencies and Imperial Publicity, 1865-1914," in Imperial Co-histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison, WI, 2003), 68-94
79. Letter from E. Sassoon, The Times, 13 August 1901
80. Robert W. D. Boyce, "Imperial Dreams and National Realities: Britain, Canada and the Struggle for a Pacific Telegraph Cable, 1879-1902," English Historical Review 115, no. 460 (February 2000): 39-70
81. Read, Power of News, 93
82. Roderick Jones to H. de Reuter, 23 and 30 March 1910, Roderick Jones Papers, sec. 1, box 6, Reuters Archive, London
83. "Weekly International Returns, Pacific Cable Board," n.d., RG3, vol. 681, file 112159, LAC
84. Keith Murdoch to Theodore Fink, 20 September 1920, Sir Keith Murdoch Papers, box 4, ser. 3, file 5, NLA; Murdoch to Fink, 19 April 1921, Sir Keith Murdoch Papers, box 5, ser. 3, file 6, NLA
85. James Curran, Media and Power (London, 2002), 166-82
86. Price, "One Big Thing," 607-9
87. For the classic study of the origins and early days of the BBC, see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 1, The Birth of Broadcasting (Oxford, 1961 )
88. For an alternative overview, see James Curran and Jean Seaton, Bower without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain, 6th ed. (London, 2003), 109-25
89. K. S. Inglis, This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983 (Carlton, Victoria, 1983)
90. Patrick Day, A History of Broadcasting in New Zealand, 2 vols. (Auckland, 1994 and 2000)
91. Frank W. Peers, The Politics of Canadian Broadcasting, 1920-1951 (Toronto, 1969)
92. Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto, 1989)
93. Nikhil Sinha, "India: Television and National Politics," in Public Broadcasting for the 21st Century, ed. Marc Raboy (Luton, 1996), 212-29
94. On Jamaica, see "North American Representative's Report on Activities of BBC New York Office during the Past Year," 6 July 1939, El/113/3, BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Caversham Park, Reading. On Newfoundland, see C. G. Graves, "Report on Broadcasting in Newfoundland Submitted to the Commissioner for Finance," June 1935, E18/43/4, WAC. On South Africa, see entries on Reith's South African tour, Sir John Reith Diaries, S60/5/4/1, WAC. On Canada, see Simon J. Potter, "Britishness, the BBC, and the Birth of Canadian Public Broadcasting, 1928-1936," in Communicating Canada's Past: Approaches to the History of Print and Broadcast Media (provisional title), ed. Gene Allen and Daniel Robinson (forthcoming)
95. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3, The War of Words, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2000), 448
96. See Simon J. Potter, "The BBC, the CBC, and the 1939 Royal Tour of Canada," Cultural and Social History 3, no. 4 (December 2006): 424-44
97. "Empire Broadcasting - Proposals Submitted by the British Broadcasting Corporation of the United Kingdom in November, 1929," printed as annex A, app. V of Imperial Conference 1930: Extract from Appendices to the Summary of Proceedings, Cmd. 3717, 140
98. Sir Ian Jacob to Sir Richard Boyer, 10 December 1959, Sir Richard Boyer Papers, box 1, file 12, NLA
99. Simon J. Potter, "The Imperial Significance of the Canadian-American Reciprocity Proposals of 1911," Historical Journal 47, no. 1 (2004): 81-100
100. Mills, Press and Communications, 103-4
101. See, e.g., Scholefield, Newspapers in New Zealand, 16-19
102. Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand's Search for National Identity (Wellington, 1986), 61-64
103. K. T. Livingston, The Wired Nation Continent (Melbourne, 1996)
104. Paul Rutherford, The Making of the Canadian Media (Toronto, 1978), 38-63
105. Cutting of "The Censorship," Christchurch Press, 14 August 1944, J. T Paul Papers, MS-0982/ 163, Hocken Library (HL), Dunedin, New Zealand
106. Cuttings of "Case That Demands Answer," Wellington Evening Post, 12 August 1944
107. and "The Use and Abuse of Censorship," Nelson Evening Mail, 15 August 1944, both in MS-0982/163, HL
108. See also "Papers Re: Debate Contrasting Censorship in New Zealand and Britain," MS-0982/682, HL
109. "Talk by Mr. L. W. Brockington K.C., to Be Radio-Telephoned to BBC," 23 March 1943; "Talk for the BBC by Mr. L. W. Brockington K.C.," 27 April [1943], both in SP300/1, box 11, NAA, NSW branch, Sydney
110. See also Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April and 11 May 1943. Brockington's Canadian broadcasts were also heard by, and would have been partly aimed at, audiences in the United States
111. Leonard Brockington, "Calling Australia," 20 June 1943, SP300/1, box 11, NAA, NSW branch, Sydney. To some extent, Brockington drew on the theme of a "people's empire" discussed in Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939-1965 (Oxford, 2005)
112. "A Good Service to Canada," Toronto Telegram, 28 February 1907
113. "The Nation and the Press," Transvaal Leader, 1 October 1908
114. Senate Report of the Select Committee on Press Cable Service (Melbourne, 1909), 49-56
115. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), esp. 433-37
116. John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge, 1992), 8-9