Making the Twain Meet: The New Imperialism of Telegraphy

Abstract

The theory of ‘rupture’ and the stages of metropolitan capitalism divided British rule over large parts of the world into different periods. Versions of the expansion of Europe since the sixteenth century show that the international system grew in internal and central strength through the exploitation of, and at, the periphery.¹ Economistic explanations of the thrust for imperial expansion in the nineteenth century were criticised as mechanical and Eurocentric.² Gallagher and Robinson allowed the dynamics of a locality, region or country to return to what had been predominantly a story of metropolitan industry and capital.³ British expansion after 1870 occurred in the context of industrial decline in Britain:⁴ did the Empire, carved out of the ‘bargain basements’⁵ of Asia and Africa, exhaust Britain? A strand of historiography sees this as a period of British industrial decline and therefore of imperial defensiveness.⁶ Expansion after 1840 was not the product of an expansionist British policy but of the need for ‘military security, for administrative efficiency, or for the protection of indigenous populations on the frontiers of existing colonies’; ‘to this extent, late nineteenth century imperialism was merely the continuation of a process which had begun centuries earlier.’⁷