Lines Between Water and Land: The Landing of Western Telegraphs in China, 1860-1887

Advisors: Anders Stephanson (Columbia), Paul Stock (LSE)

The dissertation researches the change in China's response - formed primarily by the central government in Beijing and a small group of influential individuals - to the introduction of European maritime telegraphy, from a policy of total rejection in 1860 to forming a three-party telegraph cartel with Britain and Denmark in 1887. Military needs propelled Chinese reformers to increasingly embrace telegraphy from 1874 onward and use it both defensively and aggressively through the 1880s in imperial struggles. Meanwhile, the first telegraph entrepreneurs sought the technology's commercialization for its economic sustainability. The thesis of the dissertation is that, as this deliberation on the foreign device took place, business arrangements detailing market boundaries - as set out in the 1887 Chinese-British-Danish agreement - replaced a cultural rhetoric on natural boundaries dictating the limit of Western telegraphs in China.