Wireless and empire ambition: wireless telegraphy/telephony and radio broadcasting in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, South-West Pacific (1914-1947): political, social and developmental perspectives

Abstract

This thesis explores the establishment of wireless technology (telegraphy, telephony and radio broadcasting) in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP), South-West Pacific and analyses its application as a political, social and cultural tool during the colonial years spanning the first half of the 20th century. While wireless seemed a ready-made technology for the Pacific, given its capability as a medium to transmit and receive signals instantly across vast expanses of ocean, the colonial civil servants of Britain’s Fiji-based regional headquarters, the Western Pacific High Commission (WPHC) in Suva, were slow to understand its strategic value. Conservative attitudes to governance, combined with a confidence born of Imperial rule, not to mention bureaucratic inertia and an almost complete lack of understanding of the new medium by a reluctant administration, aligned to cause obfuscation, delay and frustration. In the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, one of the most geographically remote ‘fragments of Empire’, pressures from the commercial sector (primarily planters and traders), the religious community (mission stations in remote locations), keen amateur experimenters (expatriate businessmen), wireless sales companies (Marconi and AWA Ltd.), not to mention the declaration of World War I itself, all intervened to bring about change to the stultified regulatory environment then pertaining and to ensure the introduction of wireless technology in its multitude of iterations. While also methodically tracing the manner in which wireless evolved in the colonial Pacific, specifically the BSIP, the thesis investigates and contextualises the philosophical and technical dimensions by which the authorities exploited the medium to control information flow, regulate commerce, express their own cultural dominance and suppress independence movements. Eventually, it took both the Second World War and a local rebellion against British authority to bring broadcasting into social prominence and to give a small radio voice, albeit moderated and controlled, to the indigenous Solomon Islands population.