Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technology in the British Literary Imagination, 1857-1918

Worth, Aaron. Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technology in the British Literary Imagination, 1857-1918. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2014. Print. 146 pp. 49.95 USD. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1251-6.That our has its technological, social, and political precedents (and, indeed, roots) in the age is rarely acknowledged, even as many of its media technologies-telephone, radio, movies, the QWERTY keyboard, and the phonograph-continue to play varyingly significant roles in it. We should therefore not be surprised that the nineteenth century is still very much with us: the popularity of NeoVictorian fiction and steampunk culture-for example, the current Showtime series Penny Dreadful, and Doctor Who's repeated visits to the period-attest to our unending fascination with the world of gaslight, improbably multisyllabic electronic devices, and imperial arrogance.Yet, such twenty-first century reworkings of tropes may be owed as much to their utility as mirrors of our own contemporary technological anxieties as to their original, reflexive depictions in the mass media of the time. As Jurgen Osterhammel notes in his massive 2009 survey of the period, The Transformation of the World: Today's perceptions of the nineteenth century are still strongly marked by its own selfperception. The reflexivities of the age, especially the new media world created, continue to shape how we see it (3).In Imperial Media, American English literature scholar Aaron Worth explores this and Edwardian self-perception as reflected in their contemporary fiction (and in science fiction, itself a innovation). Worth mines the novels of such writers as Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and H. Rider Haggard to glean how their depictions of the era's rapidly-changing information and media technologies (and the content they transmitted) affirmed, reflected or satirized the British imperial project. The result is a fascinating-if occasionally recondite-examination of the often neglected intersections among technology, nationalism, colonialism and popular culture.The Victorian information has been the subject of a number of books, including Tom Standage's The Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers (1998), which found numerous social and cultural parallels to our own era as people on both sides of the Atlantic came to terms with the instantaneous erasure of distance, while William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's 1991 steampunk classic The Difference Engine depicted an alternate history, one in which the age of mass computing came a century earlier than did.Worth's ambitions here are more meta: to consider how novelists at the time conceived of this nascent information age in terms of facilitating the expansion and defence of the British Empire, especially following the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58.Accordingly, is the telegraph that casts the longest shadow, with its ocean-spanning gutta-percha-coated cables providing instant communication between England and its colonies. That the Indian insurrection centred (at least in the British imagination) on control over and destruction of the subcontinental telegraph network made the technology a favourite subject for the era's novelists. …

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