ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Imperialism Beneath the Mediterranean Waves: Submarine Telegraphy – Friend or Foe?

• In Event: Sea-Work and Modern Science 1900-1939 1

English Abstract

The submarine telegraph, while central in the path to globalisation, was not the harbinger of the modern revolution its contemporaries had predicted. The submarine dimension of the technology and the accumulation of expertise made it an ideal tool of imperial ambitions. The former allowed terrestrial powers to penetrate a space – the seabed – that had not yet been claimed in territorial terms. The latter granted them the power to maintain, if not a claim, a hold over this space. In the tense geopolitical climate of the Scramble for Africa and the Eastern Question, submarine manoeuvres offered empires a discreet means of exerting influence while preserving the appearance of balance.

Ottoman, British and Italian relations around submarine telegraphy are a case in point. While the Ottoman Empire had developed its independent terrestrial telegraph network since the Crimean War, its engineers did not possess the know-how nor the resources for laying undersea cables. They therefore relied on foreign companies: British companies laid the submarine portion of the Ottoman telegraph network in the Mediterranean, which left them with highly sensitive knowledge about Ottoman infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Italian Pirelli Company—the first manufacturer of submarine cables outside Britain—cultivated a cooperative relationship with the Eastern Telegraph Company and in 1900, British representatives left Italian operators a chart of all their Mediterranean cables. When the Italo-Turkish war broke out in 1911, this privileged knowledge proved decisive: Italian cable ships severed Ottoman communications across the Aegean, cutting the mainland from its islands and securing a crucial advantage in the conquest of Tripolitania.

Submarine telegraphy transformed the Mediterranean into a space of infrastructural secrecy and epistemic hierarchy—where knowledge of the deep became a form of imperial power, and technological expertise enabled new, submerged sovereignties.

Author

• Ada Ferraresi, ERC-CoG DEEPMED Project Department of History and Geography University of Seville