ABSTRACT
India was shortened to seventeen days. Australia could be reached in four weeks. Complicated express routings combined rail and ship to move mail and parcel post at an even speedier rate. By the 1890s, almost all British possessions could be reached instantly over the networks of telegraph lines and submarine cables. The empire's primary bequest to its heirs, in fact, may have been the technological infrastructure that it developed for its own commerce and administration; just as the Romans left behind the roads of Europe, the British Victorians strung wires and relay stations across some of the world's most desolate territory and invested both capital and engineering skills to create rail lines, spectacular bridges, and deep-water ports.
