Description: A history and political economy of global communication, showing how capitalism, multilateralism, modernization, and imperialism shaped the evolution of communication.
Review Quotes: "Communication and Empire offers a noteworthy overview of the development of global communications systems prior to the Great Depression. . . . A groundbreaking analysis of the connections between private communications firms and broader issues of global development."--Benjamin Schwantes, Enterprise & Society
"[T]he great strength of this book is its exacting elaboration of so many additional vectors, which together comprise first-wave globalization of instructive complexity. If the core of the book is a global industry history that joins hardware (the cables) and 'content' (the wire services), the book is also attentive to political and diplomatic history. Readers will no doubt see striking parallels--even continuities--between the global media system that Winseck and Pike describe and the one we know today."--Lisa Gitelman, American Historical Review