Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, it can be difficult to appreciate the truly revolutionary nature of the telegraph. The nearly instantaneous nature of communication on a practically global scale had no precedent. Gutenberg's press ushered in an era of broad and, later, mass distribution of ideas, and improvements in sailing technology and the later invention of steamships hastened the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Neither, however, could compete with the telegraph for immediately connecting distant places. Daniel Walker Howe's brilliant What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (2007) even uses the advent of the telegraph as a focal point for understanding the United States in the early to mid-nineteenth century. John A. Britton's Cables, Crises, and the Press is not nearly as ambitious, but it is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the introduction of a foreign technology to Latin America in the nineteenth century.Britton has not produced a comprehensive study of new forms of communications, nor is his book an analysis of the promises and pitfalls of modernity in transforming Latin American nations or the region. Cables, Crises, and the Press is instead a series of discrete case studies that demonstrate how more immediate forms of communications shaped the press, especially in the United States, and therefore international and domestic politics in a number of Latin American nations. Britton's case studies include US-Chilean relations, US interventions in Central America and the creation of Panama, the Venezuelan border crisis, and the Spanish-American War. As this list shows, Britton is primarily interested in the ways that new technologies changed reporting about international conflicts and how that reporting in the United States and Great Britain affected policy.Britton analyzes how the near-immediacy of access to information changed the practice of foreign relations. Decision makers in the United States and Europe now had access to accurate information in time to craft policies and act on them quickly. Telegraphic communications also altered journalism, which in turn affected domestic and international politics. This is clearest in Britton's case study of the Spanish-American War, but it can also be seen in more subtle ways in the other episodes that he studies, particularly the Venezuelan border dispute with Great Britain that drew in the United States. Although Cables, Crises, and the Press uses technology as a central focus, the book really makes its important contributions in the field of diplomatic history. Britton's analysis of how the telegraph sped up and at times changed the decision-making process should be embraced by scholars of inter-American relations. Yet one of the book's main strengths is also a weakness. Rather than producing a monograph with a clear thesis or set of theses, Britton has written a series of discrete chapters in the history of inter-American relations. Although this distracts from the experience of reading a tightly focused book, it also makes Cables, Crises, and the Press a work that many scholars should consult when dealing with its various diplomatic and military episodes.The iron law of book reviews requires me to include some additional and potentially unfair criticisms, so please consider the following in that context. Perhaps this book's biggest weakness is its failure to consider the ways in which a technology that promised to draw the world closer together — like most introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — ended up atomizing the region even more. Distant communication links were with Europe and the United States rather than within or among Latin American nations. Moreover, Britton focuses on conflicts, which has some real advantages that he exploits, but he could have also studied the impact on commodity production and prices, foreign investment, and even fashion and ideas that the use of these modern forms of communications had. Having said that, Cables, Crises, and the Press is an original and thoughtful work that Latin Americanists should consult going forward.