The Tools of Empire?

ABSTRACT This piece problematises Daniel Headrick’s 1981 work on 19th-century telegraphy: Tools of Empire. Instead of viewing the telegraph as a neat Imperial tool, this piece deconstructs the cables into its messy constituent parts, teasing out the international landscapes of people and materials linked by them. We move from the colonial copper-smelters in Chile to the indigenous gutta-percha collectors of Sarawak; from the peasant tar-burners of rural Sweden to the turpentine workers trapped in camps in the postbellum American south; from the partying jute-growers of Bangladesh to the roaming cable engineers on the Indian Ocean. This piece uncovers the people, the struggles, the indigenous knowledge and the hidden work that went into a key piece of 19th-century technology.