Shrinking planet, expanding imaginary: the imperial press system and the idea of Greater Britain
| Author | Andrew Dougall |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211045620 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211045620
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(1) 48 –71
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178211045620
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Shrinking planet, expanding
imaginary: the imperial press
system and the idea of
Greater Britain
Andrew Dougall
University of Queensland, Australia
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between the 19th century ‘global transformation’ and the
contemporary intensification of communication media through the lens of Greater Britain, a late-
Victorian ordering imaginary centred on the integration of Britain and its white settler colonies.
Contrary to existing conceptions of globe-spanning media as either components of ‘interaction
capacity’ or boundary conditions that set broad outer limits for political thought, I advance an
understanding of media as socio-technical and political structures in their own right and explore
how they surface meanings and representations upon which imaginaries such as Greater Britain
depended. The argument thereby contributes to International Relations (IR) debates on global
modernity, communication media and the dynamics of historical change.
Keywords
communication media, empire, Greater Britain, international order
Introduction
The recent growth of historical International Relations (IR) scholarship has produced a
wave of theoretically ambitious engagements with the past.1 These accounts are wide-
ranging, but many pay particular attention to the profound changes in world politics that
occurred during the 19th century. This, in itself, is a significant development: for years,
much of IR regarded history as mattering first in 1648 and next in 1919.2 Today, by con-
trast, a rich array of literature on empire, culture, hierarchy and international systems
Corresponding author:
Andrew Dougall, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia,
QLD 4072, Australia.
Email: a.dougall@uq.net.au
1045620IRE0010.1177/00471178211045620International RelationsDougall
research-article2021
Article
Dougall 49
change has recast the 19th century as the crucible of ‘global modernity’ – a unique con-
figuration of ideas, practices and institutional forms, which exerts powerful effects on
the fabric of international relations down to the present-day.3
At the centre of this recast view stands a pair of interlocking developments. On one
hand, scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which 19th century world politics was
characterised by intensifying relations of global interconnection and exchange.4 On the
other, they point to a shift in what Buzan and Lawson term the ‘mode of power’ by which
these relations operated – that is, the material and ideational conditions that constitute
political actors and shape how power is exercised.5 Taken together, these trends paint a
picture of a 19th century world that was inexorably drawn together while, at the same
time, being transformed by new social and political hierarchies. Contemporaries wit-
nessed a drastic ‘shrinking of the planet’, which saw the accelerated movement of goods
and information close the temporal gulf between distant places; but they also saw the
opening of a new kind of gulf, in which a ‘core’ of industrialising European empire-states
became separated from the rest of the world along economic, racial and civilisational
lines.
While the general outlines of this narrative are well-established, parts of it have
received more attention than others. Significant bodies of work, for instance, address
how the expansion of global markets altered the balance of power in the world economy
to produce a so-called ‘Great Divergence’.6 Others explain how interactions between the
global North and South gave rise to social hierarchies stemming from what Blaney and
Inayatullah term the ‘double movement’ of modern contact zones.7 Critically important
but comparatively less explored, however – at least by IR scholars – are the nature and
effects of globe-spanning channels of communication media that made deepening inter-
connection possible in the first place.
The issue is not that communication media are absent from IR accounts of the 19th
century global transformation; it is that where they do appear, they are typically treated
as little more than conduits for the transmission of ideas that cohered elsewhere, or, at
most, as outer limits on the boundaries of political thought. In this article, I argue that
closer engagement with global media in this period instead reveals that, through their
operation as complex socio-technical political structures in their own right, they were
profoundly important in shaping the visions of global order upon which the wider trans-
formation of 19th century world politics depended.
I explore this claim in relation to the idea of Greater Britain – a late 19th century
vision of global order that centred on refashioning an increasingly centrifugal British
empire into a more coherent whole through the coming together of the United Kingdom
with the white settler colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as parts of
what is now South Africa.8 To its adherents, Greater Britain was a ground-breaking blue-
print that promised to preserve British influence and prestige at a time when both were
perceived to be failing, as well as to sidestep imperial fragmentation by producing not
states out of empire, but a unified quasi-imperial entity in its place. As a historical exam-
ple of how 19th century world politics was reimagined, meanwhile, it encapsulates the
twin forces of deepening interconnection and hierarchical stratification at the heart of
global modernity. Greater Britain depended heavily on the expansion of international
telegraphy and news,9 as well as the construction of an Anglospheric identity rooted in
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