ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on the role of the telegraph in debates over the future of the ‘Angloworld’ – the totality of Britain and its settler colonies, including the United States – at the turn of the twentieth century. Discourse about the Angloworld was saturated with fantasies of technological mastery. Its very existence as an integrated political community was predicated on the ability of communications technologies to transform human experience, annihilating time and space, and allowing a scattered collection of territories and peoples to be imagined in the singular. There were at least two distinct unionist projects, and although they overlapped they could also pull in different directions. The first demanded the consolidation of Britain and its existing settler empire. The other proposed the unification of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race, or ‘English-speaking peoples’. For some this latter constellation was compatible with the British Empire; for others it was an alternative to it. In both strands the telegraph sustained a powerful image of an imperial sensorium, a world girdled by wires and waves, electrical impulses drawing together the imagined racial family. The discourse conjured up the vision of a cyborg imperium – a translocal fusion of humans and machines, poised to order and rule the world.
