The Politics of Global Media Reform, 1907–23Media, Culture & S.docx

The Politics of Global Media Reform, 1907–23
Media, Culture & Society © 2004 SAGE Publications (London,
Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi), Vol. 26(5): 643–675
Robert Pike
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY, CANADA
Dwayne Winseck
CARLETON UNIVERSITY, CANADA
In contrast to much contemporary scholarship, which sees the
consolidation of a global media system during the 1990s as a
fundamentally new phenomenon, this article traces the rise of
globalization and a global media system back to the period
between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. It contributes to a
growing body of research amongst communication scholars
such as Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1980) and Boyd-Barrett and Tehri
Rantanen (1998), as well as in works from other disciplines
(e.g. Hirst and Thompson, 1999; O’Rourke and Williamson,
2000) and broader works such as Kevin Phillips’s study of
power and wealth in the US (2002).
The article makes three key points. First, globalization is not
new and, furthermore, the earlier phase being considered here
has been conceptualized in several different ways.
[ . . . ]

The second key point of our research is that the long period
between 1850 and the late 1920s that gave rise to the global
media system can be divided into two stages. The first stage
occurred between approximately 1880 and 1902, and was mainly
restricted to demands within the British Empire for government
ownership of cables, the main result being the laying of the
Pacific Cable between Canada and Australasia in 1902 (Pike
and Winseck, 1999; see also Boyce, 2000). However, the
analysis in this article begins a few years prior to the First
World War, when the press of the British Empire were
becoming strident in their demands for major
reform in cable communications, and moves through several
US-inspired international conferences held in Washington
between 1920 and 1923. This period represents a second phase
in a long-term movement pressing for changes in how the global
media system of the time was owned, regulated and used, and
which had three key features: critiques of cable cartels; calls for
state ownership and regulation of cables; and efforts to secure
cheaper cable rates.
[ . . . ]
The third key point, related to the second, is that there was still
a strong reform movement in Britain and the Dominions, held
over from the earlier stage, and – as noted in the ‘utopian view’
– later extended to the US, calling for low cabling rates with the
purpose of turning the cable and
telegraph into a means of mass communication. Lastly, radio
became a much touted possible rival to cable, even though up
until the late 1920s most analysts believed that it would develop
mainly as a supplementary adjunct to cable. Hence the spate of
cable-laying which followed closely upon the end of the First
World War, although paradoxically the formation of the Radio
Corporation of America in 1919 did have international

competition with British cable interests as one of its major
goals. As Lippmann remarked in Liberty and the News, all this
meant that ‘the real censorship on the wires is the cost of
transmission. This in itself is enough to limit any expensive
competition or any significant independence’ (1995: 43). We
shall return to Lippmann later in the article, but for now the key
point is that it was such prescient observations that turned
questions regarding the ownership and control of the cables, the
costs of cabling, the adequacy of their technical facilities, their
technological entrenchment, into the cornerstones of a far-
reaching politics of global media.
The political economy of the cables
Cartels and monopolies
From the 1850s onwards, domestic telegraph systems had
greatly extended their reach and become linked to a worldwide
network of cable communications. Unlike domestic telegraphs
which, with the exception of the US and Canada, were usually
state owned, the cable network consisted predominantly of
private companies interconnected in a complex series of
monopolies and cartel arrangements; and here, British
companies dominated, maintaining almost complete control over
the manufacture and laying of cables and owning two-thirds of
the world’s cables by 1900. Among these companies, the doyen
was what Daniel Headrick (1991: 39) describes as ‘the greatest
multinational company of the nineteenth century’, the Eastern
and Associated Companies, presided over by John Pender and
his son, John Denison Pender, which controlled some 46 percent
of all cables prior to the First World War and still retained a
commanding influence over government policies when
amalgamated with Marconi radio interests in the late 1920s. In
turn, these cable interests, both in Britain and elsewhere,
supported the growth of global news agencies such as Reuters
and Associated Press (AP), as well as the formation of

international markets and, of course, the spread of imperialism.
Some of these developments are well documented, others less so
(notably Ahvenainen, 1981, 1996; Coates and Finn, 1979;
Headrick, 1991; Hugill, 1999; Kennedy, 1971; Tribolet, 1929).
[ . . . ]
In short, while numerous nominally independent cable
companies existed, in reality many of them were elements of
one large Eastern controlled unit, with either John Pender or his
son, or their close associate, the Marquis of Tweeddale, on their
boards (Headrick, 1991: 36). The Eastern companies controlled
not just the running of the business through TC&M, but cable
construction, laying and maintenance, and constantly sought
exclusive landing rights, government contracts and preferential
connections with domestic telegraph companies, as they spread
across the globe. Furthermore, they protected themselves by
creating pooling arrangements with other cable firms, and
centrally through the creation of the Globe Telegraph and Trust
Company (GT&T) in 1873 [ . . . ] With Pender at the helm of
the Trust and several of its ‘member companies’, and most of
the world’s major cable companies ultimately collected in the
same premises in London – Electra House – or along a short
block of Broad Street in New York – the geography and
sociology of control over the worldwide network of cables was
remarkably tight-knit (Headrick, 1991: 36).2
Global cable penetration from the 1870s onwards has been
fairly well documented, but needs some brief outline here, not
least because of links both to news flow and later rivalries
between Britain and the US. (i) From Britain, the Eastern
Telegraph Company ran a cable system through to India, and
beyond India, another Pender company – the Eastern Extension
and Australasia Telegraph Company – linked to Singapore and
Hong Kong, with an extension to Japan, and tied in Australia
and New Zealand to Asia and Europe in 1876. Prodded by the

threat of new government-owned cables, Eastern laid a second
cable to Australia, via South Africa in 1902. (ii) By 1889, all
major cables serving the east and west coast of Africa were
controlled by the ‘Eastern’ group. (iii) The trans-Atlantic route
from Europe was served by up to 17 cables landing either in
Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, the majority of them being
controlled either by Western Union or, after 1883, the
Commercial Cable Company, which linked to the Postal
Telegraph Company in the US; the rest, by 1910, included two
German-owned cables, and, as already mentioned, two British-
owned cables and the British-dominated French cable. (iv)
Moving southward, the Eastern group’s cables ultimately
interconnected Halifax with Bermuda and Jamaica. In South
America, the Eastern-owned Western Telegraph Company was
granted a 30-year monopoly for service between Europe and
Brazil in 1873, and subsequently extended its lines to
Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Peru. In 1892–4, Brazil extended
Eastern’s monopoly for an additional 20 years on the vital route
between Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and Buenos Aires,
effectively shutting out US cable firms from much of the
eastern coast of South America until 1919 (Denny, 1930: ch.
14). However, French and German cable companies obtained
Brazilian landing rights, the German cable being part of a
concerted effort by Germany to link its imperial possessions and
perceived spheres of interest prior to the First World War.
[ . . . ]
Finally, on the trans-Pacific route from western North America,
the stateowned imperial Pacific Cable completed the first
electronic circumnavigation of the globe via Australia in 1902.
However, it did not connect with Asia, and hence the main cable
route to the Far East on the west–east axis continued to reside
with the Eastern Extension in a complex pooling arrangement
with a series of other cable companies, most notably the Danish

Great Northern Telegraph Company and the Commercial Pacific
Cable laid in 1902–3 from San Francisco to Hawaii, Guam and
the newly acquired Philippines, and thence northwards.
The above pooling arrangement illustrated perfectly the Eastern
Extension’s approach to controlling the expansion of cable
networks and potential competition, all the while maintaining
the illusion that the Commercial Pacific Cable was American
controlled.
[ . . . ]
Cables and the press
The critique of cable cartels and of the role that high rates had
in reinforcing the market power of large users also became
closely tied to issues of news flow, although the matter of
limited access for personal correspondence also played a part.
We now review some of these issues, focusing, first, on British
dominance over news; and, second, on press use of the cables
and the nature of links between cable companies and news
agencies.
(i) British dominance. American commentator Eugene Sharp
(1927: 1) observed that ‘London has long been regarded as the
news capital of the world due to its importance as an empire
center and to its fine system of cable communications reaching
out in every direction.’ Not surprisingly, the main British news
agency, Reuters, was ideally situated to gather and disseminate
news, its offices spreading out from Europe to India, the Far
East and Australasia by the 1870s. Indeed, the extent to which
Britishcontrolled news followed the cables is evidenced by the
fact that the main American possession in the Far East after
1898, the Philippines, received American news via Reuters and
that Reuters also had a stranglehold over

international news dissemination in China and Japan at the time
(Cooper, 1942: 50; Lawrenson and Barber, 1985: 51).
Furthermore, in 1869, Reuters combined with the French news
agency Havas and the German news agency Wolff, to divide up
global news-gathering and, in 1893, they were joined by
Associated Press. As part of the deal, all AP-gathered domestic
news intended for international consumption went through
Reuters, and all foreign news destined for AP went through
Reuters as well (Coates and Finn, 1979: 81). By 1912, however,
AP began rethinking its position in the combine out of concerns
about getting ‘objective’ US news into Latin America. Yet, had
the news cartel been broken at that point, AP’s ambitions to
deliver a news service in all of Latin America would still have
been compromised by British cable dominance in the region
(Lawrenson and Barber, 1985: 47). In short, whoever controlled
the cables controlled the news.
[ . . . ]
(ii) Press tariffs, cable usage and press–cable linkages. Press
agencies paid huge amounts to be first with the international
news. During some of the factional fighting between the western
US newspapers and AP in the late 1860s, when cable tolls were
running at $5 a word, for example, the factions each paid cable
bills of around $2000 weekly and almost bankrupted themselves
(Gramling, 1940: 74–5). According to one AP historian, cable
rates ‘remained the most costly convenience in newsdom’; and
even after rate reductions by the 1880s, expanded news flow
meant that AP’s cable tolls were rarely less than $300 a day,
and frequently
$2000 (Gramling, 1940: 74, 88).
[ . . . ]
The Imperial Press Conference gave international publicity to

issues of high press cable charges and the constraints they
imposed on news flows, and the apparent complicity between
the British government and cable companies. The conference
passed a resolution in support of state-owned cables, and a
Canadian delegate tabled an even broader resolution covering
‘state-owned communication across the Atlantic’, a formulation
designed to bring wireless telegraphy into the m´elange of
concerns being raised (Donald, 1921: ch. 17; The Times, 1909a,
1909b). The resolution was shelved, but it highlighted the fact
that Marconi was offering the only alternative to cables between
Canada and Britain. Even more significantly, the conference led
to the creation of an Empire Press Union, which acted as an
effective lobby group on press rates, and also breached the
opposition of the British Foreign and Colonial Offices to any
entity that formally united the press (Donald, 1921: 162).
Whilst the US press does not appear to have given the
conference much attention, Henniker Heaton’s criticisms of the
Atlantic rates had been featured approvingly in the New York
Times (NYT) as far back as 1900 and gained even more
attention as time passed (see e.g. NYT, 1908a, 1908b). His
proposal for a penny-a-word international rate also captured the
imagination of that newspaper. As one editorial noted:
. . . to the American patrons of the cable companies, the
monopolistic control of
the transatlantic lines . . . is the feature of the rate reform
movement which
appeals with greatest force. . . . [I]t is a severe arraignment of
the cable
companies which the leader of the rate reform movement has
made. . . . [T]heir
ownership, he holds, is in the hands of combinations, and their

utilization is
amongst millionaires rather than amongst the millions. (NYT,
1908b: 3)
The New York Times was even more disturbed by Henniker
Heaton’s charge that the cables were being kept idle for long
periods of time in order to maintain high rates, concluding with
the acerbic comment that ‘So far as American cables are
concerned, commerce is practically throttled’ (1909). If this
doyen of the press was any indication, the US was becoming
drawn into the politics of global media reform in a far more
direct fashion.
[ . . . ]
The revival of proposals for a state-owned Atlantic cable faced
severe opposition from the British Post Office. In a Cabinet
memorandum, it argued that a state cable offering service at
cost would be swamped with business; that two cables would be
needed, in case one failed; and that the Post Office had a firm
agreement with the Anglo-American Cable Company to give the
latter all messages not marked for a particular route (NAC,
1908).14 It was further argued that backing a state cable was
inappropriate at a time when wireless telegraphy was emerging
as a longdistance rival (see NAC, 1910).
[ . . . ]
Wilsonianism and international electronic communication
The background
Most of the major British and imperial cable reformers (Edward
Sassoon, Heaton and Sandford Fleming) had died by 1915. By
then, however, the First World War had placed the world’s

communication system under immense strain. Most of the cable
rate reforms were shelved for the duration. Ciphers and codes
were forbidden. Government messages, and those from the
troops, were sent without charge. By war’s end, the cable
networks, increasingly supplemented by long-distance radio-
telegraph, proved inadequate to meet government and business
demands. Moreover, prior to US entry into the war in 1917,
actions by the Allies had created long-term American hostility.
Britain and France unilaterally cut and rerouted the German
Atlantic cables, which had been administered on the US side by
the Commercial Cable Company, and thereby cut off direct
American contact with Germany until the early 1920s. Japan, on
the Allied side, seized the German cables in the Pacific, and
took control of the island of Yap, which was a vital centre for
American cable communications in Asia. In addition, the
position of London as the great entrepˆot for international
cables gave rise to charges that British authorities were actively
intercepting and censoring US diplomatic and commercial
charges, not only during the war but into the early 1920s.
Though Britain denied the accusations, they became another
factor influencing US attacks on British cable dominance (see
Britain, 1921a).
All this was occurring as President Wilson’s flirtations with
progressivism began to be translated into policies designed to
break up cartels, or at least to rein them in, culminating in the
Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 (Braeman, 1973: 6). In
the same year, Postmaster General Burleson advocated
nationalizing the American telegraph system and at the close of
the war the federal government temporarily assumed control of
the telegraph, telephone and cable systems in order, it was
argued, to facilitate their efficient functioning during the
communications crisis.21 Another factor was Wilson’s
advocacy of a new American diplomacy ‘which placed the good
of mankind above the selfish interests of the US’ (Braeman,
1973: 7) – which was translated into American proposals at the

Paris Peace Conference that called for open communication and
open markets as the foundation of world peace and economic
stability. From this view, monopolies had to be eliminated and a
concerted programme to develop cables and wireless pursued.
But, as we have seen, in the world of electronic communication,
most of the monopolies were British, and they controlled cable
access to eastern South America – a black eye for the Munroe
Doctrine – as well, de jure or de facto, the cable routes to the
Far East.
British cable supremacy, and hence dominance over much of the
news flow via Reuters, mediating for the British government,
became important to the US as the war spawned greater demand
for international news by the American public, and also when
the Wilson administration became aware of just how thin had
been previous American efforts to export US-sourced
news to other countries. The American news agencies prided
themselves, somewhat self-righteously, on their lack of
government subsidies and avoidance of propaganda.22
However, as a case in point, they had made negligible effort
before the First World War to send American news to South
America. Then between 1915 and 1918, United Press (UP) and
AP had to rely on the Western Telegraph, a member of the
Eastern group, to carry news to the region after their contracts
with All-America Cables were aborted as the cable company
intensified its focus on more lucrative commercial business.23
Matters turned personal, when, in China, a speech by President
Wilson was apparently so badly garbled by one of the European
news agencies that he concluded that firm action should finally
be taken to improve news portrayals of the US both
domestically and externally.
The response was the creation of the Committee of Public
Information (CPI) in 1917, presided over by Walter Rogers.
This committee was undoubtedly a propaganda agency, although

Rogers strenuously denied it, claiming that it ‘distributed news
as impartially as the AP or the UP’ (US National Archives,
1921a). Beyond heading the CPI, Rogers was a lead adviser to
the Wilson government at the Paris Peace Conference and for
some while thereafter. In this position, he favoured the second
of two opposing policy courses on communications outlined by
Wilson’s press secretary at Versailles, Ray Stannard Baker: the
first being ‘a scramble by each nation for cables, telegraphic
and telephonic control, and the use of those instrumentalities
for purely selfish national purposes’; the other, ‘a
comprehensive, cooperative scheme by which those
instrumentalities of human civilization should be
internationalized and used for the equal
benefit of all nations and all people’ (Baker, 1922, vol. II: 470–
1). Baker favoured the ‘internationalist’ course, and stressed
Rogers’ and Burleson’s role in promoting it, but complained
that they were never able to overcome the position adopted by
other members of the Wilson administration at the conference.
This, claimed Baker, combined with Wilson’s failure to study
communication issues in detail, led to existing monopoly
systems being reinforced, and crippled any proposals for the
international control of cables and radio (Baker, 1922, vol. II:
477). Ultimately, these issues were largely shunted from the
Peace Conference to a preliminary international communication
conference scheduled for Washington in 1920.
Idealism and reality
British imperialism provided a certain vision of world
electronic communications centred around the linking of the
British empire. On the other hand, Henniker Heaton’s ‘utopian
vision’ was democratic and internationalist and congenial to the
‘progressivist’ views being articulated by Rogers, Burleson,
Baker and some other officials at the State Department. Rogers’
profound interest in the links between cables and the

distribution of information and news, in particular, connected
him directly to the concerns held by Henniker Heaton. The
similarities are reflected in a 1919 memo that Rogers addressed
to President Wilson at Versailles which affirmed that:
. . . barriers to the flow of news from nation to nation due to
lack of
communications facilities, to prohibitive charges, to preferential
or discriminatory
rates, to private or national efforts to ‘guide’ the character of
news,
should be removed in the general public interest. . . . Fraught
with danger is a
situation in which the commerce of some nations languishes
through lack of
means of communication, while the commerce of others is
subventioned
through control of communication facilities. (Baker, 1922, vol.
III: 429)
His solution was for each nation to nationalize its radio
facilities, and then act together to develop a truly worldwide
radio service with commercial press messages at ‘low, uniform
rates’ (1922, vol. III: 439). He proposed also a comprehensive
joint cable scheme between Britain, Japan, China and the US,
and including the ex-German Yap cable, which would ‘provide
ample facilities at low rates’. Ultimately, electronic
communications, in his view, would need to be brought within
the purview of the League of Nations.

Where Rogers joined most closely with Henniker Heaton was in
his ‘large element of faith’ (i.e. the utopian view) that low radio
and cable rates would improve international relations through
popular education and widespread dissemination of information
(US National Archives, 1921b). This idea may seem naive
today, and even at the time Walter Lippmann’s view of media
generated ‘pseudo-environments’ countered it. In any case,
Rogers’ ‘faith’ must have been badly shaken when America
failed to join the League of Nations, not to mention that the
preliminary International Conference on Electrical
Communications in 1920 spent most of its time wrangling over
the German and Yap cables and issues of British censorship.
The conference did develop a draft treaty creating a Universal
Electrical Communications Union, but the plan ultimately came
to nothing (Clark, 1931: 198). Yet, there was a reverse side to
Rogers’ schema – namely, that since most cable monopolies
were British, then these were the monopolies which needed to
be attended to first. In this matter, the State Department agreed
insofar as it believed that the public goal for American
telecommunications overseas should be to establish independent
US cable and radio systems which would receive fair and equal
treatment in the market. This meant, in turn, giving support to
American communications
firms, and refusing to cooperate with corporate monopolists and
cartels, whether foreign or domestic (see notably Hogan, 1977:
ch. 6). And here lay the rub, at least for Rogers, since many of
the same companies that received US government support
against the strategies of foreign governments were either
monopolists or heavily entwined in cartel arrangements. And
hence they were only likely to support State Department
initiatives when their own commercial interests were not at risk.
For Rogers and his supporters, it must have been a ‘catch 22’:
indeed, Rogers’ memoranda, circa 1919–22, are full of
references to American corporate opposition to

policy proposals which he supported.
The confused record of US international communication policy
in the four years following the end of the war is typified by
RCA. During the war, the US Navy helped to create the most
advanced radio-telegraph system in the world, and subsequently
played a major role in the genesis of the Radio Corporation of
America in 1919. RCA acted as an effective challenge to British
hegemony in cable communications (in radio, Britain was far
behind the Americans) and became a dominant force exercising
de facto control of US international radio communications, not
least in South America. Here, in 1921, RCA spearheaded the
creation of a cartel with British, French and German radio
interests to avoid ‘ruinous competition’ in the region. The
consortium, with RCA at the helm, pooled patents, concessions
and capital, and controlled information flows by radio to and
from the region thus creating, in conjunction with US
opposition to government-controlled cable and radio in the
hemisphere, a basis for longterm exploitation of Latin America
by foreign communication firms (Bauer, 1995: 141–50).
Notwithstanding repeated indictments of RCA under the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and advocacy of the ‘open
communication/open markets’ policy, the US appeared to be
hypocritical and engaged in what American author Ludwell
Denny described as a competitive grab not just
of communications markets, but of armaments and raw
materials, such as rubber and oil (Denny, 1930: passim). Rogers
himself had little faith in RCA, especially after it had heaped
scorn on the proposed Universal Electrical Communications
Union in 1921. RCA, he claimed, sought to delay the Union
until it could get a ‘world-wide monopoly’ and, he continued:
. . . certain . . . American private companies seem to be haunted
by the spectre

of government ownership. . . . One of the surest ways of
bringing about
government ownership will be for the American companies to
go out and try
and rape the world, for reprisals will come so thick and fast that
American
business will cry for relief. (US National Archives, 1921c)
Mercantilism rather than openness flowed from this convoluted
state of affairs, and not only on the part of the American
government but also that of the British and other governments,
as well as the dominant corporate actors who sought, and
largely obtained, state support for their international forays. As
a case in point, the State Department focused mainly on
breaking foreign, and mostly British, cartels in Central and
South America, and in China. In the former region, there was a
concerted US campaign to break the Eastern cartel’s Western
Telegraph monopoly on the east coast of South America,
notably in Brazil. In 1916, the Brazilian Supreme Court had,
against British opposition, allowed an All-America Company
subsidiary to have connections between Argentina and Brazil, a
decision which ultimately allowed the subsidiary direct, if
circuitous, communications with the US. Historian Michael
Hogan notes that, in such circumstances, there was no way that
Pender fils, chief director of the British Eastern interests, was
going to allow a further diminution of his control of cable
traffic between Europe and South America which ran via the
Portuguese-owned Azores. Here he was:
. . . supported by the Foreign Office, the General Post Office,
and the British
Admiralty, all of whom hoped to protect Pender’s interests and,

equally
important, prevent an independent Europe–South American
connection that
would make British censorship of this traffic impossible in a
new war. (Hogan,
1977: 120)
Hence, a bevy of British lobbies in Portugal successfully
blocked US cable companies’ attempts to get landing rights in
the Azores, which would have allowed US companies
roundabout connections, via European cables, with South
America. Meanwhile, this complex labyrinth of power plays was
typically punctuated by Western Telegraph’s use against All-
America Cables of discriminatory rates on traffic between
Buenos Aires and Brazil (US Library of Congress, 1920: 29) – a
policy which, as mentioned, was anathema to Rogers and other
internationalists.
[ . . . ]
Throughout the 1920s, despite images of Britain’s economic
decline, that country remained remarkably effective at
defending its political and strategic interests in the face of
policy drives which the US government often defined as ‘Open
Door’ and anti-imperialist but which, as suggested earlier, often
looked to others like old-fashioned economic imperialism.27 So
it was in China, with which the US admittedly had a strong case
for improved communications but where, in a whole series of
economic arenas, demands for equality of treatment by the US
government were seen in London, Tokyo and Beijing as a
chance to overwhelm an enfeebled
economic state by ‘the astounding American industrial machine’

(Dayer, 1981: xvii). In the case of electronic communications,
the already noted domination of the British and Danish cable
cartel made radio-telegraphy seem the most effective alternative
for direct US communication with China. Indeed, in 1920, Owen
Young of RCA suggested a Latin Americanstyle consortium
among the various foreign radio concessions in China, with
RCA again playing a lead role in supplying equipment and
finance. However, having initially supported both RCA and the
Federal Telegraph Company of California in their abortive
efforts to develop radio in China, the State Department’s
approval for Young’s plan came too late (see Aitken, 1985:
492). Not surprisingly, there was growing Chinese opposition to
Western exploitation, and also opposition to the consortium
idea, from the British, Japanese and Danish governments,
especially within the context of the Washington Conference on
Disarmament in 1921–2. Thus, only in 1927 was RCA able to
relay radio traffic through to Hong Kong from a station in the
Philippines (Aitken, 1985: 492). Quite evidently then, while
Latin America had been opened up to direct electronic
communications with the US, including the potential for a
greater flow of press material, the US made little progress in
China. As with the ‘Open Door’ Latin American cable policy,
the US government proposed, and the private US corporations
disposed. This was particularly so in the field of banking where
J.P. Morgan & Co. thwarted a State Department plan to supplant
British bankers as major financiers in many ‘underdeveloped
areas’ including China. Morgan & Co., like Western Union, was
on excellent terms with the British government, and much
preferred to cooperate rather than compete with its foreign
counterparts for established spheres of influence (Dayer, 1981:
xvii).
Some concluding thoughts, notably on radio
From their inception, Western cable interests fostered cartels
and monopoly arrangements in order to avoid what they called

‘ruinous competition’. This prominent feature in the history of
the global media was also crucial, with state backing, in largely
negating efforts to achieve major rate reductions in Britain in
1911–12 and similarly weakened US State Department policies
in the early post-First World War period. As for the ideas of the
British and US ‘utopians’, the period under review did not yield
a democratically oriented global communication system, and
especially not one where the press and public had readily
available and affordable access to information, either
domestically or internationally. However, Henniker Heaton had
put his faith in the future of radio as a competitor to the cable
cartels and, as noted, by 1918 the Americans dominated in field
of radio-telegraphy. By 1923, partly because of lower rates and
partly because of congestion on the cables, RCA – though, as a
monopoly, it would have been anathema to Henniker Heaton,
just as it irritated Rogers – had captured 30 percent of
the Atlantic traffic and 50 percent of Pacific traffic, and was
clearly a crucial counterbalance to British hegemony in cables
(Headrick, 1991: 82). In such circumstances, one might assume
the cable companies to be running scared of the competition,
but this was hardly the case. As Eugene Sharp noted, ‘cable
companies are not inclined to take the view that their business
is imperiled by the advent of wireless’, and he pointed to the
great sums of money being invested in new and projected cables
as indicative of their confidence in cable technology (Sharp,
1927: 25).
Likewise, a cable mogul like Newcomb Carlton of Western
Union was typical in his reassurance to shareholders in 1923
that radio would be an ally to cable, not a rival (Sharp, 1927:
25). Even Rogers did not believe ‘that radio development should
take the line of driving out the cables or of cutthroat
competition with the cable; each instrumentality should develop
its own peculiar field’ (Columbia University, 1943: 24). Yet by
the late 1920s short-wave (beam) radio was undercutting the

cable business and causing major organizational
transformations, so these comments soon seemed a bit like
laughter at a funeral. However, the widespread optimism
derived from the fact that, in the early post-war years, there was
quite enough business to go around for both radio and cables.
Besides, in fairness to Rogers, he followed up the above
comments with the observation that he hoped that state-
controlled radio would provide the government with an indirect,
but effective, way of regulating the cable companies. Yet
Rogers underestimated the efforts of the cable companies,
especially the British Eastern Group, to influence the
development and uses of radio. This was most evident with
respect to the Eastern
Group’s claims over China. Thus in December 1921, a cyphered
telegram from the Foreign Office to their delegates at the
Washington conference laid out the British position on cable
and radio as arrived at in negotiations with the British and
Danish companies involved, including Marconi. The result was
that the cable companies might surrender their claim to a veto
over radio in, and to, China if their current agreements were
maintained until 1930, their exclusive rights over Chinese
coastal cables continued thereafter and, crucially, so long as
‘wireless service . . . obtain[ed] no preference over cables in
regard to rates and other matters on internal telegraph system of
China’ – i.e. that rates be kept equal (Britain, 1921b).
[ . . . ]
Walter Lippmann received early mention in this article, and so
let us end with him. Like Rogers, Lippmann was present at the
Versailles Conference but, unlike Rogers, he was disillusioned
by the deliberate manufacture of opinion both for export and
home consumption. And unlike Rogers, he had no belief that
news spread through the press could lead to international

understanding, but rather thought it would lead to the furthering
of stereotypes and prejudices. Lippmann’s proposed response to
this state of affairs was to generate expert knowledge, bureaus
of research and social science research to ‘countervail the
corrosive impact of self-interested parties on society’ (Blum,
1984: 80, 83). Although Lippmann was more inclined towards
technocracy than democracy, his views still placed him far
closer than Rogers to the reality that corporate power, in league
with the state, had made a mockery of prospects for a
democratic global media system. Unchastened, today’s
exponents attach similar notions to the
Internet and other ‘new media’, while attacks on media
convergence and of media control by mega-corporations have
taken the place of Henniker Heaton’s and Rogers’ critiques of
monopolies and cartels. Thus, while Lippmann might still be
right in his cynical views, the spirit of positive change rests
with those who dream dreams – and certainly it is to such
people that we doff our proverbial hats.
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1
2
new media & society
Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
Vol1(3):7–28 [1461–4448(199912)1:3;7–28;010895]
National borders on the
world wide web
......................................................................................
ALEXANDER HALAVAIS
University of Washington
...............................................................................................
.............
Abstract

The internet is often seen as a significant contributor to
the globalization of culture and the economy. It is also
seen as an inherently international medium, unimpeded by
national borders and removed from the jurisdiction of the
nation-state. This paper argues that although geographic
borders may be removed from cyberspace, the social
structures found in the ‘real’ world are inscribed in online
networks. By surveying 4000 web sites, it is determined
that the organization of the world wide web conforms to
some degree to traditional national borders. Web sites are,
in most cases more likely to link to another site hosted in
the same country than to cross national borders. When
they do cross national borders, they are more likely to lead
to pages hosted in the United States than to pages
anywhere else in the world.
Key words
global communication • internet • transborder data flow •
world wide web
Any recent discussion of globalization – economic or otherwise
– is
likely to make mention of the internet. The exponential growth
of the
internet in the United States, now being overtaken by growth in
the rest of
the world, has led many to question the relationship between a
new global
network and the future of sovereignty for the nation-state.
McLuhan’s
‘global village’ is frequently evoked and politicians strive to be
seen as
deliverers of information highways and wired schools. At the
same time,
many worry that instantaneous and ubiquitous transmission of
cultural

material may lead to a homogeneous world culture at best, and
an American
world culture at worst. That the internet leads inexorably
toward
globalization is often a foregone conclusion.
When evidence of internet-based globalization is presented it is
all too
often anecdotal. In the pages that follow, I will argue that
national borders
have a measurable effect on the topography of the world wide
web.
Surveying a sample of web pages allows us to determine the
geographic
distribution of hyperlinks. I will argue that these data do not
support claims
that ‘cyberspace’ exists as an anarchic unvariegated universe,
unimpeded by
national borders. Rather, while national borders seem to be less
intrusive on
the web than they are in earlier networked media, the resilience
of cultural
structures is demonstrated in the organization of this new
medium.
NATIONAL BORDERS AND COMMUNICATION
The question of identifying national borders on the internet is
complicated
by the fact that there is no clear agreement as to what ‘national
borders’ are.
By introducing a provisional definition of what national borders
entail, we
may be better able to detect homologies between these borders
and the

topography of the internet. A traditional view of the national
border
suggests itself as a starting point. In this conception, a national
border is an
imaginary boundary tied strictly to geographical territory in
which a state’s
sovereignty may be exercised (Goodwin, 1974: 100). While
such a definition
is well suited to discussions between national governments,
determining the
sovereignty of nations by their territorial borders does not
account for two
vital ingredients of a nation: its people and their culture. People
have always
made connections across national borders, but improvements in
communication and transportation technologies have made such
connections
far easier as the 20th century comes to a close. A political or
legal sense of
national borders ignores, by and large, these vital connections.
A second view of national borders is that they represent a gap in
the
totality of relationships between individuals.1 Such an approach
focuses more
heavily on networks of association rather than more static or
institutional
notions of the state. John Burton (1972), for example, suggests
that
international political theory must change to recognize increases
in
transnational practices, especially among non-governmental
groups. He
argues that the traditional ‘billiard-ball’ model of international
relations, in
which countries of differing sizes act and react only in terms of

a cohesive
foreign policy, is lacking. He proposes, instead, the ‘cobweb’
model of
international relations, in which layers of interaction define a
world of
highly complex interdependency. Such a view holds that while
physical
terrain may play a (decreasing) role in determining nationality,
it is the
imagined community, determined more by the propinquity of
ideas than by
the exigencies of physical distance, that defines nations and
their borders.
Such a network or systems approach is very much in vogue
among global
communications scholars, due in no small part to the recent
increased
potential for distanced communication brought about by
networking
technology in general and the internet in particular. The idea
that
communications media have a substantial effect on the
emergence of largescale
political formations is most often associated with Harold Innis
(1972).
However, it is Karl Deutsch’s work in drawing relationships
between
measured communication flows and national boundaries that
lays the
foundation for the study presented here. Deutsch argues that
although a
number of factors contribute to establishing a nation, many of

these are
clearly measurable in the form of patterns of communication. In
his words,
we are able to draw from ‘the observable ability of certain
groups of men
and women to share with each other a wide range of whatever
might be in
their minds, and their observable inability to share these things
nearly as
widely with outsiders’ (Deutsch, 1953: 65). By examining the
degree to
which countries communicate internally and externally, and the
character of
that communication, we should gain some understanding of who
becomes
the ‘outsider’; in other words, which ‘peoples are marked off
from each
other by communicative barriers, by “marked gaps” in the
efficiency of
communication’ (1953: 74). Measuring communicative flows on
a large
scale should provide some clues as to where these borders are
being drawn
in the collective imagination (Deutsch, 1956; also Janelle,
1991).
As one Singaporean minister has suggested, the modern nation
is like a
cell in a larger organism: porous in some respects, walled off in
others, part
of larger structures, containing sub-structures, ultimately in
control of its
own actions (Yeo, 1995: 23). By studying communication flows,
we may
gain some understanding of the structure of imagined nations
and some idea

of where their borders lie. These borders may not be as
arbitrarily exacting
as those found on a world map, but by measuring the
relationships between
individuals and groups, we may arrive at a more dynamic and
realistic
measure of nations and their borders.
[ . . . ]
[ . . . ]
ANALYSIS
An analysis of the data provided by this survey leads to findings
in two
areas. First, while the world wide web is a very international
medium, the
number of hyperlinks that cross international borders are
significantly less
than those that link to sites within the home country. Second,
links are far
more likely to be directed toward the United States than toward
any other
country, though this appears to be due in large part to the
imbalance in the
number of sites hosted in each country.
If the destination of hyperlinks are aggregated for the 12
countries best
represented by the sample, it becomes clear that domestic links
are far more
common than international links (Figure 1). With the exception
of those
hosted in Canada, sites were more likely to link to another site

within the
same country than to cross national borders (Table 2). This is
not at all what
we would expect if the world wide web were, indeed, an
undifferentiated
network. Rather, we would expect a fairly even distribution of
linkages
across the web. The tendency to link to domestic sites is
particularly
significant, given that outside of domain names in the URL
there is very
little to indicate or to restrict the user from crossing national
boundaries
while surfing the web.
Of course, web sites are not evenly distributed among countries,
so we
cannot assume that links will be. The initial diffusion of the
web was
certainly heaviest in the United States, and the relative maturity
of the web
in the US means that a majority of pages are hosted by
American servers.
Using the distribution of hosts as a guide, we would expect, for
example,
about 70 percent of all links on the web to lead to the US and
about 1
percent of all links to lead to Japan. In fact, as shown in Table
3, the United
States receives a lower percentage of links than we would
expect from sites
around the world (except from those sites located within the
US). Table 3
(and Figure 2) show how the percentage of linkages between

countries
differs from the distribution of host machines. While the
percentage of
linkages to the United States is quite high in absolute terms, it
is
unremarkable when the distribution of the web is taken into
account.
There remains a bias toward domestically produced content in
the US,
but this bias is fairly small when compared to the relatively
inwardly linking
web in France and Japan. We are left with an ambiguous
picture. A majority
of web content is created in the United States and this content is
linked to
nearly as frequently as material produced indigenously around
the world.
However, a very large part of the bias toward the United States
seems to be
as a result of the distribution of content at this stage of the
internet. If this
is, as this survey shows, an accurate depiction of today’s web,
we might
expect to see this disparity diminish as more of the world begins
to use the
internet. On the other hand, the population, economic power,
and
technological position of the United States makes it unlikely
that countries
like Canada or individual nations in Europe will be able to
challenge the
centrality of America on the web in the very near future,
especially in terms

of networking infrastructure (Evagora, 1997; OECD, 1998).
The structure of content on the web may prove to be far more
dynamic,
especially if the rapid changes in demographics of web users are
any
indication of the volatility of this new medium (Bloomberg,
1998). As has
already been noted by a number of technically as well as
socially minded
internet researchers, the measurement and mapping of the
internet is of vital
importance. In this vein, Tim Berners-Lee has called for
‘parameters of
measurement of restlessness and stability analogous to hormone
levels or
body temperature of the human organism’ as an indication of
how this
structure is changing (Berners-Lee, 1997). Such measures
should provide not
only information about ‘cyberspace’ but about how networking
affects real
space.
Strikingly clear in both Tables 2 and 3 is the tendency of sites
to link
domestically rather than internationally. When compared to two
traditional
networked media – the telephone and postal systems – the web
appears to
be much more internationalized. Yet the degree to which there
are gaps at
national borders is remarkable; even more so when it is noted

that unlike
the postal and telephone systems, the web provides no
differential pricing
for domestic and international linkages. As cost is reduced, we
would expect
the network to become increasingly interconnected. In the case
of the web,
however, it is clear that there are other, non-economic barriers
to distanced
networking. While a hyperlink from Paris to Nice may cost the
same as one
from Paris to Tokyo, the former is far more likely. The exact
location of the
most significant gaps in communication cannot be determined
by the
approach taken here, but it is clear that these gaps are to a
degree correlated
to national borders. When other borders are removed, social
homophily
guides the selection of necessarily scarce hyperlinks (Van
Alstyne and
Brynjolfsson, 1997).
As seen in Table 4, the degree to which these gaps are present
differs
depending on the subject matter found on the site. The most
internationalized pages tend to be those related to the
international scholarly
community, while the least tend to be pages related to
governmental bodies.
News, sports, and (strangely enough) travel tend to be less
oriented toward
international hyperlinks than web sites centered on other topics.
We might approach this information in two ways. We might
begin by
considering the web as an indicator of the global social

environment. For
example, scientific and scholarly communities have long been
international
in nature, as have certain political movements. As the topical
index suggests,
these groups have quickly migrated to the new medium. Other
groups have
only recently seen an increase in the need for transnational
communication.
For example, the elimination of many economic impediments
has driven
even small businesses into the international market.
However, the web has also provided excess capacity for
transnational
practices. While some Americans may be ‘bowling alone’, many
others are
taking up hobbies and interests – from anime to macram´e – for
which they
find support from outside of their physical communities. Many
businesses
approach the web as a cheap source of advertising or another
venue for sales
and ‘stumble into’ the international aspect of the medium. As
users come
to depend on the web, they enter into negotiation with its
conventions, adopting
those they like and adapting to those they do not. Because of the
reciprocal relationship between public conceptions of the web
and its actual
structure, the future of that structure remains difficult to
predict.
The preponderance of the sites in this sample contain pages in

English, as
shown in Table 5. The overwhelming presence of English on the
web is a
cause for concern, given the potential of language as perhaps
the most
powerful of ways to establish borders in this new medium
(Castells, 1997:
52). As noted above, the sample may be slightly skewed toward
sites in
countries in which the English language is dominant, so some
caution
should be taken before inferring too much from the large
number of
English-language sites. However, the percentage of English-
language sites
that link domestically is instructive. We might expect English-
language sites
to be more likely to link internationally if English is indeed the
new global
lingua franca. One possible explanation for this is that
commercial sites –
which are far more likely to be ‘dead-end’ sites, without
hyperlinks outside
the site (Terveen and Hill, 1998) – appear more often in
English. Less
surprising, perhaps, is the fairly large amount of international
linkage
associated with multilingual sites.
CONCLUSIONS
The findings presented here lead to an immediate set of
conclusions and a
more forward looking set of suggestions. The first of these is
related to a

reading of the internet at a particular point in time. The novelty
of the
internet forces discourse about it to the extremes, and hyperbole
abounds
when questions of national borders, sovereignty and the internet
are
addressed. The survey undertaken here demonstrates clearly
that, as with
earlier ‘new media’, this technology is both ‘so new that people
can’t even
imagine it’ and ‘never so new as people imagine’ (Nord, 1986).
On one
hand, while the internet incorporates little in the way of
technological,
regulatory or economic impediments to transnational
interconnections, the
web demonstrates that national cultures continue to exert a
substantial
influence on how these connections are made. While national
borders may
be eroded, they certainly remain significant.
On the other hand, when compared to other media, the internet
is
considerably more internationalized. If you examine postal
flows, none of
the 12 countries considered here receives more than 5 percent of
its total
letters from abroad (UPU, 1997). The United States, the most
insular (in
absolute terms) of the countries considered here, has over 9
percent of its
links fetching information from abroad, while other countries
have much
higher rates of international content. This presents a novel
opportunity for

people to be exposed to information and ideas from outside
their own
national cultures (to the extent that such can be said to exist). I
would
suspect that email and other more ‘personal’ uses of the internet
would be
more geographically localized and this presents an interesting
area of inquiry.
The existence of national borders, though perhaps not in the
more
traditional sense, has important policy impacts. The chief
argument against
national regulation of the internet is that it is inherently global.
This survey
indicates that for the web, national borders are neither absent
nor absolute.
Certainly there are significant challenges to designing
regulation for a social
environment that is less reliant on geography (Lenk, 1997).
However,
ridiculing policy-makers who claim that the internet can be
segmented or
controlled ignores the crucial impact of social structure on the
structure of
the medium.
In her dissent to the Supreme Court’s striking down of the
Communications Decency Act, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
argued that
cyberspace could indeed be segmented if the desire to do so was
made clear
in social policy (Reno v. ACLU, 1996). In making such an
argument, she

explicitly drew on ideas presented by Lawrence Lessig, a law
professor
presently at Harvard University. Lessig (1996) argues that there
are a number
of elements that lead to structures in the networked
environment. While
some of these are technological, most of them emerge as social
(and often
commercial) constructs. Legal borders – national and otherwise
– emerge as
social conventions. As such, they need not rely expressly upon
geography. As
the internet becomes more socialized, law will develop that
takes into
account the new borders of cyberspace (Johnson and Post,
1997). The
present position of the United States as central to the web may
also be a
cause for alarm. The future of this distribution is in no way
certain – it may
go the way of earlier mass media and the US may maintain a
central
position on the internet, as Herbert Schiller and others have
argued
(Gillespie and Robins, 1989; Schiller, 1992, 1995). However,
the widely
noted speed of diffusion of the internet outside of the United
States, and
the relatively open linking of US sites to sites abroad is likely
to present a
significant challenge to the centrality of the United States on
the web
(Maherzi, 1997: 46–7).
More important than these conclusions, which given the
ephemeral

nature of the internet remain necessarily of the moment, are the
conceptual
underpinnings of this study. An attempt to describe the social
impacts of the
internet must include some indication of the structure of this
medium. A
description that suggests the internet is an undifferentiated
space outside of
‘real’ space – as many popular and academic accounts do – must
be
approached with some skepticism. We must recognize that
‘social borders
have their own cartographies’ and go about mapping these
structures
(Harvey, 1996: 282). This is in no way a new concern – Georg
Simmel
noted that modernity has provided any number of examples of ‘a
group
whose cohesion depended upon geographic and physiological
factors,
terminus a quo, [being] entirely replaced by a group whose
cohesion was
based on purpose, on factual considerations, or, if one will, on
individual
interests’ (Simmel, 1955: 128). The internet provides a very
promising way
to observe how these borders and groups evolve. While the
future of
internetworking will most certainly surprise us, the need to
investigate the
social and informational structure of the medium will continue
to remain
among the most important tasks of the researcher.

:. As with Noli Me Tangere, fiction seeps quietly and
into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of
n anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.
:ding to a discussion of the specific origins of nationalism,
zful to recapitulate the main propositions put forward
:ntially, I have been arguing that the very possibility of
e nation only arose historically when, and where, three
cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their
ip on men's minds. The first of these was the idea that a
ript-language offered privileged access to ontological
:ly because it was an inseparable part o f that truth. It was
called into being the great transcontinental sodalities of
L, the Islamic Ummah, and the rest. Second was the belief
was naturally organized around and under high centres -
lo were persons apart from other human beings and who
ne form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human
re necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the
e sacred script, was a node of access to being and inherent
vas a conception of temporality in which cosmology and
: indistinguishable, the origins o f the world and of men
dentical. Combined, these ideas rooted human lives
e very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the
:alities o f existence (above all death, loss, and servitude)
;, in various ways, redemption from them.
, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in
[rope, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic
coveries' (social and scientific), and the development of
rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between
~ n d history. N o surprise then that the search was on, so to
a new way of linking fraternity, power and time
y together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this

made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made
for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about
and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new
The Origins of
National Consciousness
If the development of print-as-commodity is the key to the
generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity, still, we are
simply at
the point where communities o f the type 'horizontal-secular,
transverse-time' become possible. Why, within that type, did the
nation become so popular? The factors involved are obviously
complex and various. But a strong case can be made for the
primacy
of capitalism.
As already noted, at least 20,000,000 books had already been
printed by 1500,' signalling the onset ofBenjamin's 'age
ofmechanical
reproduction.' If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane
lore,
print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination.2 If,
as
Febvre and Martin believe, possibly as many as 200,000,000
volumes
had been manufactured by 1600, i t is no wonder that Francis
Bacon
believed that print had changed 'the appearance and state o f
the
world.'3
One of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprise, book-
publishing
1. The population o f that Europe where print was then known

was about
100,000,000. Febvre and Martin, T h e Coming of the Book, pp.
248-49.
2. Emblematic is Marco Polo's T r a v e l s , which
rernainedlargely unknown till its
first printing in 1559. Polo, T r a v e l s , p. x i i i .
3. Quoted in Eisenstein, 'Some Conjectures,' p. 56.
I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S
felt all of capitalism's restless search for markets. The early
printers
established branches all over Europe: 'in this way a veritable
6 ' .
international" of publishing houses, which ignored national [sic]
frontiers, was created.'4 And since the years 1500-1550 were a
period
of exceptional European prosperity, publishing shared in the
general
boom. 'More than at any other time'it was 'a great industry
under the
control of wealthy capitalists.'5 Naturally, 'book-sellers were
pri-
marily concerned to make a ~ r o f i t and to sell their ~ r o d u
c t s , and
consequently they sought out first and foremost those works
which
were of interest to the largest possible number of their con-
temporaries. %
T h e initial market was literate Europe, a wide but thin stratum

of
Latin-readers. Saturation o f this market took about a hundred
and
fifty years. The determinative fact about Latin - aside from its
sacrality- was that it was a language o f bilinguals. Relatively
few
were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in
it. In
the sixteenth century the proportion o f bilinguals within the
total
population o f Europe was quite small; very likely no larger
than the
proportion in the world's population today, and - proletarian
inter-
nationalism notwithstanding-in the centuries to come. Then and
now the bulk of mankind is monoglot. The logic of capitalism
thus
meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the
potentially
huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would
beckon. T o
be sure, the Counter-Reformation encouraged a temporary re-
surgence of Latin-publishing, but by the mid-seventeenth
century the
movement was in decay, and fervently Catholic libraries
replete.
Meantime, a Europe-wide shortage of money made printers
think
more and more of peddling cheap editions in the vernaculars.'
4. Febvre and Martin, T h e Coming of the Book, p. 122. (The
original text,
however, speaks simply o f 'par-dessus les frontieres.' L I A p p
a r i t i o n , p. 184.)
5. Ibid., p. 187. The original text speaks of 'puissants'

(powerful) rather than
'wealthy' capitalists. L'Apparition, p. 281.
6. 'Hence the introduction o f printing was in this respect a
stage on the road to
our present society of mass consumption and standardisation.'
Ibid., pp. 259-60. (The
original text has 'une civilisation de masse et de
standardisation,' which may be
better rendered 'standardised, mass civilization.' LJApparition,
p. 394).
7. Ibid., p. 195.
O R I G I N S O F N A - r l O N A L C O N S C I O U S N E
S S
The revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism was
given
further impetus by three extraneous factors, t w o of which con-
tributed directly to the rise o f national consciousness. The
first, and
ultimately the least important, was a change in the character o f
Latin
itself. Thanks to the labours o f the Humanists in reviving the
broad
literature of pre-Christian antiquity and spreading it through the
print-market, a new appreciation of the sophisticated stylistic
achievements of the ancients was apparent among the trans-
European intelligentsia. The Latin they n o w aspired to write
became
more and more Ciceronian, and, by the same token, increasingly
removed from ecclesiastical and everyday life. In this way it
acquired
an esoteric quality quite different from that o f Church Latin in
mediaeval times. For the older Latin was not arcane because of

its
subject matter o r style, but simply because it was written a t
all, i.e.
because of its status as text. N o w it became arcane because o
f what
was written, because o f the language-in-itself.
Second was the impact of the Reformation, which, at the same
time, owed much of its success to print-capitalism. Before the
age of
print, Rome easily won every w a r against heresy in Western
Europe
because it always had better internal lines o f communication
than its
challengers. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses
to the
chapel-door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German
translation, and 'within 15 days [had been] seen in every part of
the
country.'s In the two decades 1520-1540 three times as many
books
were published in German as in the period 1500-1520, an
astonishing
transformation to which Luther was absolutely central. His
works
represented no less than one third of all German-language books
sold
between 1518 and 1525. Between 1522 and 1546, a total of 430
editions
(whole o r partial) of his Biblical translations appeared. ' W e
have
here for the first time a truly mass readership and a popular
literature
within everybody's reach.'9 In effect, Luther became the first
best-
selling author so known. O r , to put it another way, the first

writer
who could 'sell' his new books on the basis o f his name.10
8. Ibid., pp. 289-90.
9. Ibid., pp. 291-95.
10. From this point it was only a step to the situation in
seventeenth-century
I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S
Where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal
religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next
century. In this titanic 'battle for men's minds', Protestantism
was
always fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it
knew
how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being
created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended
the
citadel of Latin. The emblem for this is the Vatican's Index
Libronrm
Prohibitorum - to which there was no Protestant counterpart - a
novel
catalogue made necessary by the sheer volume of printed
subversion.
Nothing gives a better sense of this siege mentality than F r a n
~ o i s 1's
panicked 1535 ban on the printing of any books in his realm -
on pain
of death by hanging! The reason for both the ban and its un-
enforceability was that by then his realm's eastern borders were
ringed with Protestant states and cities producing a massive
stream of

smugglable print. T o take Calvin's Geneva alone: between
1533 and
1540 only 42 editions were published there, but the numbers
swelled
to 527 between 1550 and 1564, by which latter date no less than
40
separate printing-presses were working overtime."
The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism,
exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new
reading
publics - not least among merchants and women, who typically
knew
little o r n o Latin - and simultaneously mobilized them for
politico-
religious purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that
was
shaken to its core. The same earthquake produced Europe's first
important non-dynas tic, non-ci ty states in the Dutch Republic
and
the Commonwealth of the Puritans. (Fransois 1's panic was as
much
political as religious.)
Third was the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular
vernaculars as instruments ofadministrative centralization by
certain
well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs. Here it is useful
to
remember that the universality of Latin in mediaeval Western
Europe never corresponded to a universal political system. The
France where Corneille, Molikre, and La Fontaine could sell
their manuscript
tragedies and comedies directly to publishers, who bought them
as excellent

investments in view of their authors' market reputations. Ibid.,
p. 161.
11. Ibid., pp. 310-15.
O R I G I N S O F N A T I O N A L C O N S < : I O U S N E
S S
contrast with Imperial China, where the reach of the mandarinal
bureaucracy and o f painted characters largely coincided, is
instructive. In effect, the political fragmentation o f Western
Europe
after the collapse of the Western Empire meant that n o
sovereign
could monopolize Latin and make i t his-and-only-his
language-of-
state, and thus Latin's religious authority never had a true
political
analogue.
The birth o f administrative vernaculars predated both print and
the religious upheaval o f the sixteenth century, and must
therefore be
regarded (at least initially) as an independent factor in the
erosion of
the sacred imagined community. A t the same time, nothing
suggests
that any deep-seated ideological, let alone proto-national,
impulses
underlay this vernacularization where it occurred. The case o f
'England' - on the northwestern periphery of Latin Europe - is
here
especially enlightening. Prior t o the Norman Conquest, the
language
of the court, literary and administrative, was Anglo-Saxon. For
the

next century and a half virtually all royal documents were
composed
in Latin. Between about 1200 and 1350 this state-Latin was
superseded by Norman French. In the meantime, a slow fusion
between this language of a foreign ruling class and the Anglo-
Saxon
of the subject population produced Early English. The fusion
made it
possible for the new language to take its turn, after 1362, as the
language of the courts-and for the opening o f Parliament.
Wycliffe's vernacular manuscript Bible followed in 1382.'2 It is
essential to bear in mind that this sequence was a series of
'state,' not
'national, ' languages; and that the state concerned covered a t
various
times not only today's England and Wales, but also portions of
Ireland, Scotland and France. Obviously, huge elements o f the
subject
populations knew little o r nothing of Latin, Norman French, o
r Early
English.13 Not till almost a century after Early English's
political
enthronement was London's power swept o u t o f 'France'.
O n the Seine, a similar movement took place, if a t a slower
pace.
12. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, pp. 28-29; Bloch, Feudal
Society, I , p. 7 5 .
13. W e should not assume that administrative vernacular
unification was
immediately or fully achieved. I t is unlikely that the Guyenne
ruled from London
was ever primarily administered in Early English.

IMAGINE11 C O M M U N I T I E S
As Bloch wrily puts it, 'French, that is to say a language which,
since
i t was regarded as merely a corrupt form of Latin, took several
centuries to raise itself to literary dignity',14 only became the
official
language of the courts of justice in 1539, when F r a n ~ o i s I
issued the
Edict of Villers-CotterEts.15 In other dynastic realms Latin
survived
much longer - under the Habsburgs well into the nineteenth
century.
In still others, 'foreign' vernacilars took over: in the eighteenth
century the languages of the Romanov court were French and
German.16
In every instance, the 'choice' of language appears as a gradual,
unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development.
As
such, it was utterly different from the selfconscious language
policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with
the
rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms. (See below,
Chapter
. .
6 ) . O n e clear sign of the-difference is that the old
administrative
languages were just that: languages used by and for
officialdoms for
their o w n inner convenience. There was no idea of
systematically

imposing the language on the dynasts' various subject
populations.17
Nonetheless, the elevation of these vernaculars to the status of
languages-of-power, where, in one sense, they were competitors
with Latin (French in Paris, [Early] English in London), made
its o w n
contribution to the decline of the imagined community of
Christendom.
At bottom, i t is likely that the esotericization of Latin, the
Reformation, and the haphazard development o f administrative
vernaculars are significant, in the present context, primarily in a
negative sense - in their contributions to the dethronement of
Latin. -
It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new
imagined
national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them
being
present. W h a t , in a positive sense, made the new
communities
imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction
between
14. Bloch, Feudal Society. 1, p. 98.
15. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 48.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. An agreeable confirmation o f this point is provided by
Fransois I , who, as we
have seen, banned all printing of books in 1535 and made
French the language o f his
courts four years later!
O R I G I N S O F N A r l O N A L C 0 N S C : I O U S N E S
S

a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a
technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human
linguistic diversity.18
The element o f fatality is essential. For whatever superhuman
feats
capitalism was capable of, it found in death and languages two
tenacious adversaries.19 Particular languages can die or be
wiped out,
but there was and is n o possibility of humankind's general
linguistic
unification. Yet this mutual incomprehensibility was
historically of
only slight importance until capitalism and print created
monoglot
mass reading publics.
While i t is essential to keep in mind an idea of fatality, in the
sense
of ageneral condition of irremediable linguistic diversity, i t
would be a
mistake to equate this fatality with that common element in
nationalist ideologies which stresses the primordial fatality of
particular languages and their association with particular
territorial
units. The essential thing is the interplay between fatality,
technology,
and capitalism. In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in
the
world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that
for
their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives,
was
immense; so immense, indeed, that had print-capitalism sought
to
exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have

remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied
idiolects
were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into
print-
languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any
system
of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process.20 (At the
same
time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential
18. I t was not the first 'accident' o f its kind. Febvre and
Martin note that while a
visible bourgeoisie already existed in Europe by the late
thirteenth century, paper
did not come into general use until the end o f the fourteenth.
Only paper's smooth
plane surface made the mass reproductionof texts and pictures
possible - and this did
not occur for still another seventy-five years. But paper was not
a European
invention. I t floated in from another history - China's -
through the Islamic world.
T h e Corning o f t h e Book, pp. 2 2 , 30. and 45.
19. W e still have no giant multinationals in the world of
publishing.
20. For a useful discussion of this point, see S. H . Steinberg.
Five Hundred Yearsof
Printing, chapter 5 . That the sign ouxh is pronounced
differently in the words
although, bough, lough, rough, cough, and hiccough, shows both
the idiolectic
variety out o f which the now-standard spelling o f English
emerged, and the
ideographic quality o f the final product.

IMAGINE11 COMMUNITIES
assembling zone. O n e can detect a sort of descending
hierarchy here
from algebra through Chinese and English, to the regular
syllabaries
of French o r Indonesian.) Nothing served to 'assemble' related
vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits
imposed
by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically reproduced
print-
languages capable of dissemination through the market.21
These print-languages laid the bases for national
consciousnesses in
three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified
fields of
exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken
vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches,
Englishes, or
Spanishes, who might find it difficult o r even impossible to
understand one another in conversation, became capable of
comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process,
they
gradually became aware o f the hundreds of thousands, even
millions,
o f people in their particular language-field, and at the same
time that
only those hundreds of thousands, o r millions, so belonged.
These
fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print,
formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the
embryo of

the nationally imagined community.
Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in
the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to
the
subiective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us,
the
printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually
infinite
reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject
to
the individualizing and 'unconsciously modernizing' habits of
monastic scribes. Thus, while twelfth-century French differed
markedly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth, the rate o
f
change slowed decisively in the sixteenth. 'By the 17th century
languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern
forms.'22 T O
21. 1 say 'nothing s e r v e d . . . m o r e than c a p i t a l i s m
' a d ~ i s e d l ~ . Both Steinberg and
Eisenstein come close t o theomorphizing 'print' qua print as
the genius of m o d e r n
history. Febvre and M a r t i n never forget t h a t behind print
stand printers and
publishing firms. It is w o r t h remembering i n this c o n t e x
t that although printing was
invented first i n C h i n a , possibly 500 years before its
appearance in E u r o p e , it h a d n o
m a j o r , l e t alone revolutionary i m p a c t - p r e c i s e l y
because o f the absence o f
capitalism there.
22. T h c Coming ofrhe Book, p. 319. C f . L'Apparirion, p.
477: 'Au X V I I e siecle, les
langues nationales apparaissent un peu partout cristallisies.'

ORIGlNS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
put it another way, for three centuries now these stabilized
print-
languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words o
f our
seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that
to
Villon his twelfth-century ancestors were not.
Third: print-capitalism created languages-of-power of a kind
different from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain
dialects
inevitably were 'closer' to each print-language and dominated
their
final forms. Their disadvantaged cousins, still assimilable to the
emerging print-language, lost caste, above all because they were
unsuccessful (or only relatively successful) in insisting on their
o w n
print-form. 'Northwestern German' became Platt Deutsch, a
largely
spoken, thus sub-standard, German, because i t was assimilable
to
print-German in a way that Bohemian spoken-Czech was not.
High
German, the King's English, and, later, Central Thai, were
correspondingly elevated to a new politico-cultural eminence.
(Hence the struggles in late-twentieth-century Europe by certain
'sub-'nationalities to change their subordinate status by breaking
firmly into print - and radio.)
It remains only to emphasize that in their origins, the fixing of
print-languages and the differentiation of status between them
were
largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive

interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic
diversity. But as with so much else in the history o f
nationalism, once
'there,' they could become formal models to be imitated, and,
where
expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit.
Today,
the Thai government actively discourages attempts by foreign
missionaries to provide its hill-tribe minorities with their o w n
transcription-systems and to develop publications in their o w n
languages: the same government is largely indifferent to what
these
minorities speak. The fate o f the Turkic-speaking peoples in
the zones
incorporated into today's Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the USSR is
especially exemplary. A family of spoken languages, once
everywhere assemblable, thus comprehensible, within an Arabic
orthography, has lost that unity as a result o f conscious
manipulations. T o heighten Turkish-Turkey's national
consciousness
at the expense o f any wider Islamic identification, Atatiirk
imposed
IMAGINED C O M M U N I T l E S
compulsory r o m a n i ~ a t i o n . ~ 3 T h e Soviet authorities
followed suit,
first with an anti-Islamic, anti-Persian compulsory
romanization,
then, in Stalin's 1930s, with a Russifying compulsory
Cyrillicization.24
W e can summarize the conclusions to be drawn from the
argument

thus far by saying that the convergence of capitalism and print
technology o n the fatal diversity of human language created
the
possibility o f a new form o f imagined community, which in
its basic
morphology set the stage for the modern nation. T h e potential
stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the
same
time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing
political boundaries (which were, on the whole, the highwater
marks
of dynastic expansionisms).
Yet it is obvious that while today almost all modern self-
conceived
nations - and, also nation-states -have 'national print-languages',
many of them have these languages in common, and in others
only a
tiny fraction of the population 'uses' the national language in
conversation o r on paper. T h e nation-states of Spanish
America or
those of the 'Anglo-Saxon family' are conspicuous examples of
the
first outcome; many ex-colonial states, particularly in Africa, of
the
second. In other words, the concrete formation of contemporary
nation-states is by no means isomorphic with the determinate
reach
of particular print-languages. T o account for the discontinuity-
in-
connectedness between print-languages, national consciousness,
and
nation-states, it is necessary to turn to the large cluster o f new
political entities that sprang up in the Western hemisphere
between
1776 and 1838, all of which self-consciously defined

themselves as
nations, and, with the interesting exception o f Brazil, as (non-
dynastic) republics. For not only were they historically the first
such
states to emerge o n the world stage, and therefore inevitably
provided the first real models of what such states should 'look
like,'
but their numbers and contemporary births offer fruitful ground
for
comparative enquiry.
23. Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism, p. 108. It is probably o
n l y fair to add that
Kemal also hoped thereby to align Turkish nationalism w i t h
the modern, romanized
civilization o f Western Europe.
24. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 317.
Creole Pioneers
The new American states of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth -
centuries are o f unusual interest because it seems almost
impossible to
explain them in terms of t w o factors which, probably because
they
are readily derivable from the mid-century nationalisms of
Europe,
have dominated much provincial European thinking about the
rise of
nationa!jgrn, --- " - -- ' A
IrrfLe first place, whether we think of Brazil, the USA, o r the
d r r n e r colonies of Spain, language was not an element that -
-

d i f f e ~ g t i a t e d - --- them _-__I from _ _ _ their _-_.--+
respes~ive imperial metropoles. All,
i<cluding the USA, were creole states, formed and led by
people who
- -
shared a common language and common descent with those
against
i
whom they fougM.1 Indeed, it is fair to say that language was
never
even an issue in jhese early struggles for national liberation.
- -
In the second place, there are serious reasons to doubt the
applicability ili much of the Western hemisphere of Nairn's
/
otherwise persuasive thesis that:
,
The arrivay of nationalism in a distinctively modern sense was
tied to
the politidal baptism of the lower classes. . . Although
sometimes
1. ere$ (Criollo) - person o f (at least theoretically) pure
European descent but
born in the ~ m e r i c a s (and, by later extension. anywhere
outside Europe).

The Politics of Global Media Reform, 1907–23Media, Culture & S.docx

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