Telegraph Services Research Articles

Dezvoltarea sistemului de comunicații în Bucovina - poștă, telegraf, telefon

The study presents the great progress made by the institution of post, telegraph and telephone in Bukovina, especially in the 19th century, when, established on solid foundations, these institutions reached the level of organizations abroad and became important factors of modernization of society. Postal services emerged from the need for long-distance communication, which involved finding quick solutions for transporting or transmitting messages. Since the time of the military administration, a mail service on horseback was organized in Bukovina for military-administrative purposes. The first regular civil post office, with regular postal connections to Galicia and Transylvania, was opened in Chernivtsi on January 1, 1783, by the Viennese Johann Paul Vogel. The postal service has developed at a sustained pace in relation to population growth and ever-expanding business relations. In 1908, 213 post offices were operating. Relative to the area and number of inhabitants, a postal service covered 49 km2 and served 3 428 inhabitants. The steady, thoughtful and consistent development of the postal system over the decades was supplemented very early on by the introduction of the telegraph and, somewhat later, the telephone service. The first telegraph office that included Bukovina in the European telegraph network was established in Chernivtsi in 1855. At the end of 1896, the telegraph network had a total length of 764,34 km and 45 stations. In 1908, there were 104 post offices with telegraph service and 44 authorized railway telegraph stations. The first telephone exchange in Bukovina was built in 1883, in Chernivtsi, and then a fixed telephone network was extended in and between the cities and towns of Bukovina.

Христианские сектанты на государственной службе в 1909–1914 гг.: к вопросу о приеме на почтово-телеграфную службу меннонитов и молокан

Introduction. The relevance of the research topic is due to the weak elaboration in the works of modern historians of the problem of participation in civil service in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century of representatives of non-Orthodox Christian denominations (Mennonites and Molokans). Methods and materials. The article presents correspondence of the Main Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire on the issue of admission to the postal and telegraph service of Molokans and Mennonites in 1909–1914. This set of documents reflects the practical implementation of the principle of freedom of conscience in the Russian Empire during the period of gradual abandonment of civil rights and freedoms declared in the course of the Revolution of 1905. The documents also record the transformations that took place in the worldview of Mennonites and Molokans. The research uses historical-comparative, problem-chronological methods, methods of archeography and historical source studies. Analysis. The purpose of the article was to identify the attitude of state bodies to the admission to the civil service (on the example of the postal and telegraph department) of candidates from among sectarians (Mennonites and Molokans) after the revolution of 1905–1907. An active liberal reform of the Russian religious legislation there was in 1905–1912. However, the religious factor continued playing a role in entering the civil service. The documents reflect the negative attitude towards the admission of sectarians (primarily Molokans) to the civil service of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Department for Foreign Confessions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They focused on the anti-state tenets of the Molokan creed. The management of the Main Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs in 1914 decided to ban Molokans from taking positions in the postal and telegraph department. It is noted that in the Mennonite ethnoconfession, a revision of the attitude to family and marriage, to the role of women, to civil service begins. Molokans at the beginning of the twentieth century also rejected some tenets of faith, in particular, pacifism and denial of the state oath. Authors’ contribution. O.Yu. Redkina identified and prepared archival documents for publication, conducted a historical source and archeographic description. T.P. Nazarova considered the transformation in the worldview of Mennonites and Molokans at the beginning of the twentieth century, their attitude to civil service, to the position of women in the family and society.

Establishing Colonial Hegemony through Science: A Study of British India and Robinson’s Mars Trilogy

Science and technology have always been used as powerful tools, and technologically advanced countries like the USA are consequently more powerful. In the modern context, power can be seen in the hands of transnationals or multinationals that control society through science. Looking at the historical use of science as power the example of the British is prominent as they used science and technology as effective instruments to establish and consolidate their control over India. For this purpose, they established scientific universities in India, constructed Railways in 1837 for easy and fast transportation of resources and introduced postal and telegraphic services. It is interesting that this strategy of using science and technology is found across the globe in the hands of those who want to establish their hegemony. The science fiction Mars Trilogy, which is very futuristic and imaginative, uses this motif. In the novel the transnationals, using science and technology, start shifting the inhabitants of Earth to Mars for the extraction of its resources and to establish hegemony over the new colony. Mars Trilogy is an excellent depiction of how colonial powers use science, and it contains an implicit warning for the future.

INOSTRANI IZVJEŠTAJI O POČETKU VELIKE ISTOČNE KRIZE U LISTU „SRPSKE NOVINE“

The Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) is considered one of the turning points in recent Serbian history, which occurred as a result of decades of agrarian and social dissatisfaction and the desire for the national liberation of the Christian population from the Turkish authorities. In historiography, the eastern crisis encompasses a somewhat wider chronological framework, and its beginnings are related to the uprising in the village of Krekovi, near Nevesinje, on July 9, 1875. In a short time, the uprising spread to Bosnia, and then to the Macedonian, Bulgarian and Kosovo territories. Taking into account the fact that this issue has attracted a lot of attention from the European public, the subject of this paper is the reports and announcements of the foreign press about the beginning of the Great Eastern Crisis, which “Srpske Novine” published in parts or in whole during July 1875. Due to the relatively fast flow of information and the use of telegraph services, the press was, at that time, an extremely important source. Based on the offered foreign reports and announcements, which were published almost daily by “Srpske Novine”, we analyzed the first conflicts in Herzegovina, in July 1875, in order to bring closer the way in which the appearance of the uprising was interpreted on the pages of the European press.

INTERCULTURALIDADE: UMA EXPERIÊNCIA DA TROCA DE CARTAS ENTRE ALUNOS DO BRASIL E DO JAPÃO

The aim of this article is to promote an analysis of the intercultural experience carried out through the exchange of letters with children from the city of Ninomiya, Kanagawa Province – Japan, with children from the Municipal Education Network of the Veranopolis, Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil. The exchanges take place annually through the Post and Telegraph service in Brazil and Japan, between students from the 3rd to 9th years of this network. Japanese children write to Veranians and vice versa. They tell facts about their routine, their city, peculiar aspects of their daily lives, including photos and geographic and cultural characteristics specific to each local space. This experience invites us to expand our gaze on the importance of thematizing, in the educational process, sociocultural aspects of different peoples, social groups, customs and ways of being and living together. We challenge ourselves to reflect on how this practice of exchanging letters, between children from two very different countries, both socially and culturally, manages to raise awareness about issues related to interculturality as a field of debate about identity processes that constitute an environment. Furthermore, it allows us to analyze issues related to the ease of writing and the symbology used to describe aspects related to the daily life of each child, as well as the subjectivity in each message in the exchange of letters. The reciprocity in exchanges, the care with the details present in each report, the richness that makes up the writing and how everyday life presents itself with similarities and differences in the life of each student, whether here or in Japan, are essential components in the construction of this analysis . Keywords: Local history. Interculturality. Education. Global citizenship.

Development, Growth, Performance and Closure of Telegraph Services – A Case Study of Indian Telegraph Service

The first telegraph line was opened in India by the East India Company in 1851 for their use, and the service was made available for public traffi c in 1855. Initially, the telegraph service functioned along with the Postal Department and it was under the control of PWD in 1851, Commerce and Industry Department in 1905, and back to PWD in 1914. Thereafter a combined P&T Department was formed in 1914 and a separate Telecom Department in 1985. Finally, it was converted as a Telecom Company, the BSNL in 2000.The service remained as an important mode of communication for more than one century to the pockets of the common man, lawyers, Jawans, and armed forces and the service run on welfare lines from the beginning. On the introduction of other latest modern telecom services, the demand for the service came down drastically after 2000. Faced with a huge shortfall in revenue the state run telecom fi rm, the BSNL discontinued the telegram service with effect from 15th July 2013. Telegrams have been of social and historical signifi cance for 163 years in the country and the vacuum created by its closure cannot be fi lled in by any other mode of service.

НОВОЕ СРЕДСТВО СВЯЗИ И СТАРАЯ СИСТЕМА (ИНТЕГРАЦИЯ ТЕЛЕФОННОГО ДЕЛА В СИСТЕМУ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО РЕГУЛИРОВАНИЯ СВЯЗИ В РОССИИ В КОНЦЕ XIX – НАЧАЛЕ XX ВЕКА)

The paper analyzes the process of formulating the main principles of the state regulation of the telephone activities in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even though the emergence of the telephone in Russia matched the process of the whole unified postal and telegraph service’s organizing, crucial necessity of including the telephone into the system of the state management of communications did not become just a step in these reforms’ development. It caused the discussion on another matter, namely on the main principle of the system’s functioning, i.e. perception of the communications as the subject of the state monopoly. Thus, the Russian government’s attempts to adopt the telephone to a broadly settled system of the state regulation happened to be followed by the debates on neither administrative no technical, but on the legal and economic matters. Lately, they moved to the principle of the state monopoly in the communications sphere as a whole and to perception of the latter as a source of the state income. Nevertheless, during the analyzed period, the focus of all the disputes was made on responding to the private capital’s threat to the monopoly status of the government. However, its main concern was not the monopoly itself, but one of its aspects, i.e. the most commercially profitable way to build and use the telephone communications.

Czas kolejowy

Railway Time The inventions of the electromagnetic telegraph and the railroads significantly accelerated communication in time and space. It greatly influenced the way time was expressed and forced a change of centuries-old patterns and habits. It became necessary to gradually move away from local times (the average solar times of individual places) to the uniform time in the scale of entire countries, and then to the zone time. This process began in the 1830s on the railway and a few years later in the telegraph service, developing in parallel and in conjunction with the railroads. Initially, individual railway authorities adopted the same railway time on their networks (usually the capital time of a given country or the directorate’s headquarters). From 1884 until the first decade of the 20th century, culminating in the early 1990s, they gradually switched to zone time. Its introduction improved the work of railways, increased traffic safety, and made it easier for passengers to find their way around train timetables. Almost in parallel, since the mid-1860s, the process of switching from a twelve-hour count to a 24-hour count of time on the railways took place. In the rich literature devoted to time in its various aspects, few studies focus on the issues of organizing the measurement and expression of time on railways, and there are virtually no studies relating to railways in the present-day Polish lands which at the time operated under three different state authorities. The work aims to collect and systematize the facts that contributed to the process of introducing the 24-hour zone time on Central European railways and to present this process in the context of the world railways.

Edme Hippolyte Marié-Davy. Contribution to electrochemistry

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Edme Hippolyte Marié-Davy (1820-1893) fue un médico y científico francés que realizó investigación básica y práctica sobre una variedad de aspectos teóricos y experimental de la electricidad, baterías, fisiología, y meteorología. En este artículo se describe su trabajo sobre la electroquímica. que llevó al desarrollo de la pila de bisulfato de mercurio que lleva su nombre y que en una época fue usada extensamente por el servicio francés de correos y telégrafos y en la guerra de Crimea.</span></p>

The Post Roads Act of 1866: The Story of the Dawn of Communications Regulatory Policy

The beginning of federal communications regulatory policy was the Post Roads Act of 1886. So spoke the Federal Communications Commission on its Silver Anniversary. It's 1866. The Civil War is over. Western Union has won. Southern telegraph competition had been turned into tree tinsel. A grateful U.S. Government gave Western Union 15,000 miles of telegraph line. A few years earlier, the largest telegraph companies formed the North American Telegraph Association and agreed to divide the market. When the U.S. Government asked for bids for the transcontinental telegraph line, the Association made sure that Western Union was the only bidder and that Western Union bid the maximum price. When the line was completed, Western Union acquired all of its rivals. A transcontinental telegraph line which had promised to unite the nation in fact united the telegraph industry. Sen. John Sherman (R-OH) was displeased. He did not like excessive telegraph rates, Western Union's monopoly, or the lack of universal service. Sherman introduced the Post Roads Act in order to provide open access to public land and post roads, lowering barriers to market entry, fostering competition, and mitigating Western Union's market power. Sen. Sherman wanted to ensure that new entrants were on the same playing field as Western Union. Did the Post Roads Act work? Nope. It backfired. Jay Gould took advantage of the Act in a hostile take-over of Western Union. Western Union took advantage of the Act to expand its market and to railroad any authority that attempted to get in its way. Any insignificant rival who challenged Western Union was soon neutralized and acquired. The result was market consolidation, not competition. Sen. Sherman had at his disposal remedies that would not work. Either telegraph service could be owned and operated by the government, like the Postal Service, or it could be an unregulated private industry. Technological innovation and market evolution had disrupted legacy policy implementation. Sen. Sherman would have to evolve policy implementation to respond to new circumstances, harms, and challenges. Communications regulatory policy begins with disruption. Was the Post Roads Act the beginning of communications regulatory policy? Yes. It was the first time Congress enacted legislation to generally restrain the private communications industry. It was incorporated as the first section of the Communications Act of 1934. In that nascent moment, so much of today's policy discourse was present.

Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters by Megan Finn

Reviewed by: Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters by Megan Finn Scott Gabriel Knowles (bio) Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters. By Megan Finn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 280. Hardcover $39. A disaster is a disruption of the expected order of events, and that disruption is mediated by information technology. What we most need to know—but what the disruption often obscures from us—are the names of the injured and dead, the sites of greatest danger, and the commands of government officials working to restore safety. In her valuable new volume Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn develops a set of earthquake history case studies through which to explore the crucial dimensions of "information infrastructures." The theoretical apparatus of the book revolves around two crucial concepts. First are the "information orders": "institutions, technologies, and practices that might characterize how societies produce and share documents" (p. 3). These information orders provide the social and material context for the possibilities of knowing any given event (a disaster in this case). Flowing from this first and more general concept is a sharper historical analytic, the "information infrastructure": both material and relational, this infrastructure is comprised of the "ongoing processes involved in the production and circulation of documents" (p. 6). Finn is especially attentive to the public dimensions of information infrastructures and the ways they frame the political struggles of a particular time and place. She takes as a given the social construction of information and technology in her theorization, looking constantly for places where the intended function of a technological system, from the telegraph to a disaster action plan, is modified according to the identities of users and the material facts on the ground. In the end, we must see the information order as a "site of contention over which accounts of an event are treated authoritatively" (p. 151). With her analytical project defined, Finn looks across time to see how these "public information infrastructures" behave in different disasters. She wants to "consider how the public information infrastructure after each earthquake did or did not recover" (p. 157). In this, Finn is writing in [End Page 704] the historiographic tradition established by crucial works like Carl Smith's Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief (1995) and Christine Meisner Rosen's The Limits of Power (2003), and updated by recent works like Joanna Dyl's Seismic City (2017). From a disaster studies perspective, this temporal gallivanting is essential. It shows how disasters in different times and places consistently defy the emergency-managerial imperatives like clear lines of authority and communication. Finn argues that in the earthquake cases she surveys, "the dominant institutions tended to stay dominant in times of disaster, as people came up with interesting work-arounds to enable the continuity of public information infrastructures. The technologies and practices that people use regularly are also the technologies and practices that they lean on in times of disaster" (p. 158). Disasters, then, don't represent extrahistorical breaks from an imagined normal life in which a new world is constructed out of the rubble. One fascinating continuity across time is the perception of time lag in the making and dispensation of postdisaster information. In the case of the 1868 Hayward Fault Earthquake, and again after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, this problem showed up in the challenge of establishing an authoritative account of damage due to the disruption of telegraphic service. Newspapers scrambled to publish special editions, but damage to the telegraph network slowed reporting. For individuals, telegraphic offices served as sites of information-seeking, but they failed to deliver messages with the rapidity customers expected—many thousands of messages were finally carried via the postal service. Finn describes with narrative skill and in close detail the public outcry when it was learned that "telegrams were not delivered by the wires but instead were physically transported across the country by boat and train" (p. 61). This failure of infrastructure revealed in both 1868 and certainly by 1906 just how accustomed Americans were to near-instantaneous information connectivity—its deprivation and the anxiety caused by the lack of information about loved ones provoked a second disaster after the...

History of the development of telecommunications infrastructure in Japan

Japan has one of the most well-equipped telecommunications infrastructures in the world. The rich Japanese information environment is the result of a long telecommunications infrastructure construction process. This paper describes the historical process of the development of Japan’s telecommunications infrastructure from the introduction of telegraph technology in the late 19th century to the recent expansion of mobile broadband. From the early stage of the construction of telegraph networks, an efficient geographical configuration for Japan’s international telecommunications has been sought. First, a westward route to European countries was built at the beginning of telegraph services and then the eastward route connected directly to the United States was opened. During the construction of the international coaxial submarine cables after World War II, the combined use of the westward and eastward telecommunications routes similar to the early international telegraph networks was retained. In the early 2000s, ultra-high-speed trans-Pacific telecommunications networks were constructed corresponding to rapid expansion of Internet use. The main route of Japan’s international communications shifted to the eastward one. In contrast, the geographical configuration of the domestic telecommunications in Japan has been essentially unchanged. The domestic telegraph networks had been steadily expanded from the large metropolises to local cities from the end of the 19th century to the early 20th century. Even the recent optical fiber networks maintain a similar configuration. Although new broadband services, e.g., DSL, optical fiber and mobile telecommunications, were installed corresponding to the expansion of Internet use, the geographical configuration of domestic telecommunications networks has been kept.

Rhythm and the “Postal Unconscious” in Suburban Sketches: W. D. Howells’s Realism and the Atlantic Monthly at the Turn of the 1870s

이 연구는 지금까지 경시되어 온 W. D. 하월즈의 여행기 『교외 소묘』를 논하는 것을 통해 미국 사실주의의 성립에 리듬 의식이 결부되어 있음에 주목한다. 삶을 구성하는 한 측면이자 소통을 위한 재현 형식의 구성적 요소 중 하나인 이 리듬은,『교외 소묘』의 경우, 특히 출판 매체였던 『아틀랜틱 먼쓸리』와의 관계 속에서 형성되었다. 본고는 그 과정을 밝힘으로써 하월즈의 사실주의는 당대의 변화하는 소통의 미디어적 조건, 즉 페니 우편 등으로 가속된 소통의 템포를 반영하는 동시에 이를 재구성하려는 “우편적 무의식”이었음을 드러낸다.This paper aims to clarify the involvement of what can be considered “rhythm” in the establishment of American realism by focusing on a hitherto neglected work by W. D. Howells, Suburban Sketches. I argue that this rhythm is both an aspect of represented life and a structuring element of the representational form. In the case of Suburban Sketches, it was primarily formed in relation to its periodical publishing medium, the Atlantic Monthly. By showing the layers of the interactions between that magazine and the text of Suburban Sketches, this study reveals that Howells’s realism was an attempt to produce an interstice for different speeds of life and communicative modes from the dominant ones which it partly affirms, too. I argue this was carried out in challenge of the changing media condition that saw the consolidation of the Penny Post and telegraph service at the turn of the 1870s.

KÜRESEL BİR BAKIŞ AÇISIYLA TÜRKİYE’DE İÇ DENETİMİN GELİŞİMİ

Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, iç denetimin Türkiye’deki gelişimini gözlemlerken, aynı zamanda iç denetim mekanizmalarının küresel boyutta geçirdiği evrelerle de bu gelişimin etkileşimini incelemektir. Bu nedenle, akademisyenlerin, enstitülerin (IIA), iç denetim işini fiilen yapan kişilerin ve kurumların literatüre farklı açılardan bakmalarını sağlaması ve teori ile uygulama kapsamındaki faaliyetleri karma bir şekilde değerlendirmesi bakımından, çalışma ayrı bir önem taşımaktadır. Küresel ölçekteki iç denetim faaliyetlerinin dünden bugüne nasıl şekillendiği, temel nedenler ve varsayımlar ile yapılan literatür incelemelerinin ışığında derinlemesine bir yaklaşım ile araştırılmıştır. Örneğin, tarihte iç denetim faaliyetlerinin kökleri milattan önce üç bin beş yüz yılına kadar uzanmaktadır. Öte yandan, iç denetimin Türkiye’deki geçmişi ise, on altıncı yüzyılda Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun muhasebe kayıtlarını kontrol etmesine kadar dayanmaktadır. Daha sonraları, 1860 yılında Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Mektup ve Telgraf Hizmetleri için ilk denetim birimi kurulmuştur. Sonuçta, Türkiye, son yıllarda pek çok alanda bir değişim ve gelişim sureci içine girmiş ve özellikle mali sistem alanında gelişmiş ülke düzeyine ulaşabilmek için gerekli yasal ve yapısal değişimleri gerçekleştirmek için büyük çaba sarf etmektedir. Bu durum, iç denetim alanında da sonuçlarını göstermiş ve iç denetim mevzuatında ve uygulamalarında önemli değişimler olmuştur. Özellikle, 2000’li yılların başında itibaren Türkiye, uluslararası alanda meydana gelen bu değişimlere ayak uydurmak ve değişimleri ulusal düzeye adapte etmek için, kurumlar seviyesinde iç denetim standartları geliştirmiş ve bu çerçevede yasal düzenlemelere gidilmiştir.

Реорганизация почтово-телеграфного управления в России в середине 1860-х - начале 1880-х гг.: несостоявшееся формирование объединённой службы связи

The paper explores the evolution of the Russian communications regulation system from the middle of the 1860s up to the early 1880s. It observes the main stages of reorganization of the postal and telegraph service during that period, with a special focus on formation of the united communications service during the middle of the 1860s. The next matter it deals with is the period of temporary suspension of trying to integrate the governmental management of the two means of communications. To be precise, it was formed by dissolution of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs in 1868 and abandoning the measures to join postal and telegraph offices in 1874. Thereafter the paper concerns such an aspect of the reform as repeated formation and liquidation of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs in 1880-1881. Special attention is devoted to identification and analyses of the purposes of the postal and telegraph reform and the reasons of its failure.

Formação do Sistema de Comunicações em Santa Catarina: Telefonia (1876-1927)

The following article aims to discuss the addition of telephone services to the communications system in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina from the installation of the earliest telephones in Desterro in 1876 to the late 1920s. The installation of telephone services is framed within the movement towards modernization combining and overlapping geo-economic layers formed by transport, communications, and electricity services consolidated by state participation, forming regional economic systems. The article is divided into four sections, with the first section offering a brief historical context from the invention of the telephone to its arrival in Brazil, in parallel to the expansion of the telegraph network. The second section narrates the earliest telephone initiatives in Santa Catarina, spanning the period of 1876 to 1907, merging telephone and telegraph services. The third section discusses the fragmented advances made by telephone services from 1907 to 1918, highlighting activities by Grossenbacher & Trinks in Joinville and Florianopolis. Finally, the fourth section analyzes the period of 1918 to 1927, describing the telephone’s limited consolidation in Santa Catarina with the emergence of telephone providers in some of the state’s main cities, but whose services failed to meet the demands of rapid urban expansion.

Państwowe przedsiębiorstwo pocztowe, telegraficzne i telefoniczne w II Rzeczypospolitej

The article presents an analysis of one of the main companies in pre-war Poland. The author describes how the activities of postal, telegraph and telephone services were organized and the importance of state telecommunications company for organizing social and economic life, particularly through monolithic approach to distribution of information in Poland. This is followed by description of commercialization of the company and its further development, particularly during the Great Depression.

Telecommunications in the Porfirian Era [Porfiriato

Communications in the Porfirian era immediately brings to mind the railroads that contributed to bringing Mexico into the modern world, leaving behind the burdens of colonial times and the internal fighting of the nineteenth century. However, there is little information and research on telecommunications during the Porfirian era or Porfiriato although it is precisely at this time when the first telecommunication revolution takes place in Mexico. As the foundations of telecommunications in Mexico are established during the Porfiriato, this articles presents a snapshot of the general situation at the beginning of Porfirio Diaz’s regime, as well as the bases for regulating telegraph and telephone services. All this data will provide the context needed to address the specific and different aspects of telegraphy, telephony and radiotelegraphy discussed in this article.

The Postal Service in the Douar: Noncitizen Users and the Colonial State in Rural Algeria from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Second World War

Throughout the colonial period, Algerian users are largely absent from the administrative archives of the Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone Service (PTT). If the French conquest did not spur colonized populations, with their ancient writing practices, to “enter into communication,” should this absence be understood as the refusal of a progress that was itself colonialist? The period between the two world wars marked a turning point: pressure from local representatives and a wave of petitions from noncitizen (Algerian) villagers reconfigured a public service previously monopolized by European users. Belatedly, and with as little expense as possible, the administration finally supported postal services for isolated areas.Observing the colonial configuration in the most situated and ordinary of its manifestations, this article sheds light on everyday writing practices and reinstates the “thickness” of a local service. Rather than limiting the study to the French presence in Algeria, this depends on pressing the colonial documentation to reveal the workings of Algerian society and the reorganizations prompted by the colonial encounter. Complaints and petitions thus illuminate the relation of noncitizen, rural, and mostly illiterate populations to the colonial state. The unexpected utilization of the postal service and subversive demands for access to it led colonized populations to piece together a political identity that borrowed certain practices from active citizens and drove the French authorities to propose unprecedented adjustments.

Estimating technology in the postal sector: a Bayesian approach

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to study the technology of the sector represented by the Spanish national post-office and telegraph service, Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos, S.A. trading as Correos, and denominated as such hereafter. Concretely, we analyse economic efficiency (technical and allocative) and scale economies of the production units (cost centres) of Correos. To do this, we employ a methodology based on an input distance function which is the dual of the cost function. Moreover, and applying duality theory, we develop an economic model to assess the effect of postal infrastructures on the operators’ costs. In order to carry out the empirical model, Bayesian econometrics is applied to estimate the parameters in the input distance function and the technical and allocative efficiency terms.