SHN Lecture: In the Wake of Submarine Telegraphy: How Cables Made the Deep Sea Knowable and Strategic

Communication networks are in the crosshairs. Warfare, rising international tensions, monopolistic private companies and the ravages of climate change currently make global means of communication seem more vulnerable than they have for decades. Internet cables at the bottom of the sea suddenly appeared as military targets in the winter of 2024, when three connections across the Baltic broke down under suspicious circumstances involving vessels linked to China and Russia. Today’s dangers to global communications might appear to be unprecedented, but the past holds plenty of precursors. Critical communications infrastructure at the bottom of the sea has been a topic of international concern for over a century.

Histories of terrestrial imperialism and colonialism stress the central importance of representations in the exercises of possession and control. Representations, and the imaginative visions that animate them, may be even more important for various uses of the oceans, particularly their depths. When submarine telegraphy was first proposed in the mid-19^th century, the deep-sea floor was hardly imaginable. While hydrographers and scientists helped render it a hospitable home for telegraph wires, so too did an array of representations, technical and artistic, make it knowable and usable for human purposes. The extension of telegraph cables around the globe by the turn of the 20^th century transformed now-knowable space into strategic, political space that might, in turn, guarantee world peace, ensure military might, or prove vulnerable to forces human and natural.