The Eastern Telegraph Company in the Ottoman Empire at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A History of Imperial and Foreign Technology.

This article examines the relationship between the Ottoman Telegraph Administration and the Eastern Telegraph Company, a British firm that built and managed the majority of the empire’s submarine telegraph cables. With telegraph stations along the empire’s shores, this company came to play a central role in intra- and trans-imperial communication. While on a superficial level the company appears to have controlled the underwater infrastructure in the empire, an examination of how the technology was actually operated reveals another story. By connecting company records with sources from the imperial administration from the 1860s until World War One, this article argues that the submarine telegraph network prompted an entangled relationship between the Ottoman state and the foreign company, whereby Ottoman actors affected company practice and the company mediated the Ottoman state’s emergence as a telegraphic power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]