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.