Mapping and modernizing the Indian Ocean Rim: Communication technologies under colonial Britain

Abstract

This article traces some political and economic questions and challenges faced by colonial Britain in networking the Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) through the telegraph and wireless technologies. In the process, the article demonstrates that communication media contributed to the definition of the IOR as a geographical entity, much of which constitutes the global South today. The study concludes with a note on the legacies of media modernization inherited by these societies following independence as, ironically, an apparatus constructed to network and connect the region became fragmented as properties of postcolonial nations, used in the service of independent nation-building and national development. Now that these countries have come together in the recent Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation, implications for a networked region remain to be seen.

The Postcolony and Its Radio

“…In studying the practice of such theory-building from the bottom-up, a critical study of communication and media policy assumes centre-stage. The next chapter draws attention to the further globalisation of media and the policies governing them, taking off from early technology-associated internationalisation as Sosale (2014) suggests, over the larger part of the twentieth century, as has been illustrated in this chapter. As evident in this chapter, De Certeau's ideas on historicity, writing historiography, placespace, and orality inform a practice-oriented approach to historicising the international.…”

“…Numerous uprisings and calls for greater autonomy had emerged by then across South Asia, even as the British made strategic efforts to quell them by introducing the telegraph and the railways as tools for modernisation. Sosale (2014), in her work on the introduction of the Telegraph by the British in the Indian Ocean Region, draws on Potter's (2007) work in studying the colonial British government's communication efforts using a network heuristic. Her work, she writes, seeks to draw back linkages to the colonial era, which she sees as the progenitor of globalisation, and British ideas of modernisation and development as evident in the colonial governance apparatus, only to become more pronounced in a postcolonial world.…”

Airing imperium: A historiography of radio governance in South Asia

“…Numerous uprisings and calls for greater autonomy had emerged by then across South Asia, even as the British made strategic efforts to quell them by introducing the telegraph and the railways as tools for modernization. Sosale (2014), in her work on the introduction of the telegraph by the British in the Indian Ocean Region, draws on Potter’s (2007) work in studying the colonial British government’s communication efforts using a network heuristic. Her work, she writes, seeks to draw back linkages to the colonial era, which she sees as the progenitor of globalization, and British ideas of modernization and development as evident in the colonial governance apparatus, only to become more pronounced in a post-colonial world.…”