"During the first century of the republic, two modes of communication at a distance - telecommunications - were etched into lands inhabited by Native Americans; contested by rival European powers; and occupied by the United States. Both telecommunications systems supported this expanding US territorial empire but, despite this overarching commonality, they branched apart in other ways. One network was owned by the state and the other by capital, and the two branches of the telecommunications system developed disparate rate structures, patterns of access, and social and institutional relationships. During the decades after the Civil War their divergence became politically charged. Would one model prevail over the other? Going forward, would it be the government Post Office or the corporate telegraph that set the terms of telecommunications development? The Post Office was the nation's originating system for communication at a distance. Both before and long after it was elevated to a cabinet department in 1829, furthermore, the Post Office was by far the largest unit of the central state. In 1831, the nation's 8700 postmasters comprised three-quarters of federal civilian employment; half a century later (excluding temporary postal employees and ordinary and railway mail clerks and letter carriers), some 50,000 postmasters accounted for perhaps one-third of all civilian employees in the executive branch. Though its relative weight as a government employer diminished after this, its workforce continued to swell. During the last two antebellum decades, meanwhile, an emergent technology - the electrical telegraph - was passed quickly from the federal government to private capital. The two systems' institutional identities immediately began to contrast in otherways"--
A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century.
Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power.
In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of
executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers.
This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.
