Telegraph Technology and Administrative Internationalism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This essay examines telegraph technology in the context of the establishment of the International Telegraph Union (ITU), and Japan’s membership in that union as an aspect of Japan’s introduction to international society. The ITU represented a novel internationalism in the nineteenth century—an “administrative internationalism” open to states, semi-sovereigns, and colonies. To a state such as Japan, membership in the ITU offered linkages to the global network of telegraph cables and represented a version of international society in which Japan might be the equal of the treaty powers that had forced Japan in the 1850s into the European order of great powers and their domination.