Jean-Michel Johnston’s Networks of Modernity covers one emerging nation – Germany – over half a century. Johnston’s object is the establishment of telegraph lines throughout the territory of the German states and later the Kaiserreich. While it makes the most of the historic specificity of that setting, the book also shows more generally the interplay of the forces which pulled and pushed the building of telegraph lines across the world in different directions during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Although it necessarily includes aspects of all three, Johnston’s is not a clear-cut political, social, or cultural history. Rather, it is a history of networks and of the forces that shaped them, be they states, private actors, companies, business associations, or combinations of all three.

The book begins with a swift introduction, which addresses the theoretical grounding of the work and presents its thesis that because of the „Janus-faced“ nature of communication networks which „not only create connections and relations,“ but in establishing new connections provide advantages for those connected while disadvantaging those who remain unconnected, „the very ambiguity of modernity“ was due, at least to a significant part, „to the unprecedented expansion of networks of communication during the nineteenth century“ (p. 6). Johnston then provides a prologue that sets the stage for the main narrative by reaching back into time as a far as the sixteenth century with its religious conflicts and the devastation wrought upon Europe by the Thirty Years War. This, in his telling, set the stage not only for the Napoleonic Wars but also the concomitant technical advances that they spurred, most notably the halting but still substantial use of semaphore telegraphy which was a useful, if flawed, technology of both warfare and empire for France.

The German states, at times direct participants in these conflicts and at times sidelined but still affected, took their own message from the rise of faster messaging: for them, too, this was where the future lay. Telegraphy, understood as the transmission of messages across large distances using symbols and technical systems, was not something inherently new that arose at this point in time. Rather, in the messaging innovation race, electric telegraphy was often seen as an alternative telegraphic technology that could do things better than the older optical kind. The telling of that story, most clearly in Johnston’s sub-chapters on the Hanseatic cities, helps once again cast innovation as a series of rivaling approaches to similar problems in which one or few tend to win out, and therefore contributes productively to ongoing discourses in the history of science and technology to counter the Whiggish tales of heroic progress often found in popular tellings.

What exactly the term „Germany“ encompassed at different points in the nineteenth century between the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the creation of the Kaiserreich remains slippery, and Johnston, too, does not attempt a rigid definition. He has in his sights all German states, but naturally concentrates on where construction projects moved forward, and thus on the major players that made the German network possible; Prussia, first and foremost, as well as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Austria, and the small but economically powerful city states of Hamburg and Bremen. For the most part, this analytical flight level is adequate to grasp the developments across Germany when it comes to the construction of telegraph lines and the discussions that accompanied them. Questions remain, however, as to how in detail different places went about getting their telegraph lines constructed. The workers who constructed the lines, for example, would have deserved a more in-depth treatment, which would have made for a more grounded and livelier history.

Networks of Modernity is split into two main parts. The first, 1830–1849, describes the changing meaning of „telegraphy“ from a sluggish and inflexible system using semaphores to the electric telegraphy that would dominate the rest of the century. It tackles the issues governments and corporations had with picking the „winning“ technology from among a growing number of competing and non-interoperable systems, also addressing the political circumstances that led to the construction of certain telegraph lines during the Vormärz and through the ultimately unsuccessful 1848–49 revolution. In terms of technology, Prussian entrepreneur Werner Siemens and his operations are foregrounded. Siemens’s Siemens & Halske company in Berlin, along with factories making the wires for telegraphy, and therefore the expansion of the technology possible, such as Cologne-based Felten & Guilleaume, would turn out to be important for the rest of the century and beyond as well.

Johnston also makes sure to include the doings of the Deutsch-Österreichischer Telegraphen-Verein (DÖTV) which coordinated the rates and interchanges for the various large players and was a vital intermediary in creating workable networks across borders. This provides us a window into national and international cooperation but also rivalries, as do the connections between large news agencies such as Reuters, the AP, and Wolffs, their German equivalent.

The first part’s three chapters – 1. Expectations, 2. Realities, 3. Resolution – cover the studied period roughly chronologically. This is a sound approach, but it does create some slight disjunction, as each chapter stands on its own, with its own subchapters and narrative logic, yet each ends with a look at Hamburg and Bremen; repeatedly titled „The Hanseatic Exception.“

Part 1 ends at the useful fulcrum point of the revolutions of 1848 in which, as Johnston remarks, „matters of transport and communication constituted a field on which the context between conceptions of the nation and the state could be played out.“ Yet, such matters have been „[o]ften marginalized in the historiography of the 1848 revolution.“ (p. 86) The second part covers the years from 1850–1880. Its chapters are slightly longer, and there are also three of them; 4. The Dawn of the Network Society, 5. Staying Ahead, Falling Behind, 6. A Nation Connected. An epilogue concludes the book.

Networks of Modernity is an essential book. Its only faults lie in its ambition. Its few weaknesses tend to be editorial rather than auctorial. Johnston has done the best he can, and in fact, perhaps the best possible, to wrangle the myriad political units of nineteenth-century Germany and their varied and changing approaches to telegraphy into one eminently readable book. But there are some issues. Narratively, the multipoint story has several centers that all more or less coexist. Academic history, of course, is all about complexity and denying us neat stories where there are none to be had. Still, there is the question of narrative stringency even within these confines.

Even if Oxford University Press could have been somewhat more thorough in its copyediting – the odd typo and mistranslation do stick out – this is a generally very well put together book in every way. It will be required reading for anyone trying to understand the complexities of nationalization and communication in nineteenth-century Germany, and should be read in conjunction with books such as Roland Wenzlhuemer’s Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World, Heidi J. S. Tworek’s News From Germany for which it is, in certain ways, a prehistory, and Simone M. Müller’s Wiring the World, which explores a similar time period as Johnston’s book from a transatlantic, not a national perspective. It slots into a large literature on the connections between nationalism, globalization, standardization, and communication.1

Very commendably, Networks of Modernity is available open access and under a Creative Commons license, which should contribute, along with the book’s solid scholarship and deft writing, to it achieving the readership it deserves. A thorough bibliography and a useful index accompany the publication.

Note:
1 Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization, Cambridge, UK, 2013; Heidi J. S. Tworek, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945. Cambridge, Mass., 2019; Simone M. Müller, Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks, New York 2016.