In Submarine Telegraphy and the Hunt for Gutta Percha, Helen Godfrey traces the connections between submarine telegraphy and the peoples of Singapore and Sarawak (Borneo) who supplied 'gutta percha', the latex insulating the world network of undersea telegraph cables. The book examines the complex inter-relationships linking metropolitan and local environments in a trade once described as a matter of interest to the whole civilized world. Using previously untapped corporate and official archives, trade data and a rich documentary record, the study explores the roles of cable producers, scientists, administrators, and local Chinese and indigenous traders. It reveals how a global trade may transcend technological, geographic and cross-cultural challenges, even hostilities. Motivations and outcomes are more complex than simple commercial gain.

Explores the role of technology in the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asia. In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the place of technology in this region and its pivotal role in the emergence of the modern technological world. Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology, Moon examines and links technological stories from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. She uses analytics in the history of technology—such as circulation, coproduction, and assemblage—to highlight the processes and evolving patterns of technological dynamism that characterize the region. Drawing on research focused on specific technologies, including temple construction, rice agriculture, weaving, and shipbuilding, Moon investigates the interconnectedness of these technologies within the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asian history. In contrast with portrayals of Southeast Asia as technologically deficient, Moon demonstrates the richness of this region's technological cultures. She rejects polarizing binaries such as traditional and modern or indigenous and foreign, instead underscoring Southeast Asia's role as a dynamic cocreator of the modern technological world. Technology has contributed to the creation and disruption of social and political orders; shaped engagements across barriers of distance, culture, and language; and produced and reproduced diverse cultures in this region. This narrative of technological change offers students, scholars, and readers critical new perspectives on both technological history and Southeast Asian history.

Explores how Britain's global cable network became both the 'nervous system' of its Empire and the key to electrical physics.

The volume examines the proliferation of inventorying models and practices as cultural techniques of knowledge organization and production during the long nineteenth century. While inventories are still broadly treated as raw data and unprocessed source materials, the book shows how they function as complex media formats, intersecting and interfering with other material techniques to produce, store, distribute, organize and process cultural information. How do inventories work against and in dialogue with other media of collection, storage and retrieval such as catalogs, indexes, bibliographies, and archives; what new media configurations do techniques of inventorying enable and how, in turn, are such techniques shaped by the media channels and formats they employ; what is at stake in the critical effort of "taking stock", whether as commercial, bureaucratic, literary, historiographical, or scientific operations; finally, what do such operations tell us specifically about the production and circulation of knowledge in the German nineteenth century?

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Networks of Modernity: Germany in the Age of the Telegraph, 1830-1880 offers a fresh perspective on the history of Germany by investigating the origins and impact of the 'communications revolution' that transformed state and society during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon the period 1830-1880, exploring the interactions between the many different actors who developed, administered, and used one of the most important technologies of the period-the electric telegraph. It reveals the channels through which scientific and technical knowledge circulated across Central Europe during the 1830s and 1840s, stimulating both collaboration and confrontation between the scientists, technicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats involved in bringing the telegraph to life. It highlights the technology's impact upon the conduct of trade, finance, news distribution, and government in the tumultuous decades that witnessed the 1848 revolutions, the wars of unification, and the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871. Following the telegraph lines themselves, it weaves together the changes which took place at a local, regional, national, and eventually global level, revisiting the technology's impact upon concepts of space and time, and highlighting the importance of this period in laying the foundations for Germany's experience of a profoundly ambiguous, networked modernity.

"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis. This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of its 31 chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: key approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. Taken together, the Oxford Handbook of Commodities History offers insight into the directions in which commodities history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world"--