CABLE EMPIRES: THE CO-PRODUCTION OF EMPIRE, TECHNOLOGY, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Abstract Data, as one way of governing the world by rendering it legible, actionable, and subject to prototyping, has become a central concern in recent years for scholars, policy makers, and citizens alike. Yet in many accounts, digital technologies and data are purported to be objects and not sources of governance, immaterial, or without a long historical social construction. In contrast to these claims, this thesis shows that the material infrastructures underlying those technologies have a deep history connected with nineteenth-century imperialism, were socially constructed, and were shaped by international legal regimes that facilitated their development and proliferation, and which they in turn helped shape. This study aims to understand the relationship between technology and international law using insights from science and technology studies (STS) and material approaches to international law. More specifically, it explores the question of what kind(s) of agency and normativity technology has in relation to international law and global governance. It does so by exploring the large technological system of undersea cables, as the material infrastructures underlying data and information and communications technologies (ICTs). Drawing on the work of Sheila Jasanoff, and specifically on the concept of coproduction, this thesis makes the argument that technology’s normative effects were not only enabled and constructed by international law, but they helped shape international law and its institutions through transforming knowledge about the world, thereby shaping ideas of how to best govern it. By linking distant territories together, the material infrastructures of undersea cables enabled significant transformations in international legal and political thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through perceived time and space compressions and their ‘global’ geographies. In reshaping how people viewed the world, undersea cables helped shape normative infrastructures and projects consistent with those visions. An often-overlooked aspect in histories of international law is the role of technology in helping structure the world we live in today. As technologies increasingly become both objects and sources of governance, historical and contemporary analyses of international law and global governance can benefit from the study of how technologies have reshaped understandings of the world and thereby shaped ideas of how to best govern it.