This volume pays particular attention to Britain's embeddedness-and role in shaping-a rapidly expanding global communications network. In particular, it reflects the links between communications and Britain's imperial and colonial projects. It covers:
- The development of imperial communication routes and infrastructures as well as, in the late nineteenth-century, the introduction of imperial penny postage
- The ramifications of new technologies and media of communication for warfare and diplomacy between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the First World War
- Emigrants' correspondence
- The domestic significance of communication infrastructure in relation to British national identity
- The 1874 establishment of the Union Postale Universelle and related initiatives to globalise communications