Neoliberalism’s antecedent histories and the colonial conjunctures of media and communication

Sanjay Asthana

Third World Quarterly, 2025, vol. 46, issue 12, 1461-1480

Abstract: This article explores the antecedent histories of neoliberalism that took shape in the crucible of empire, in the colonial outposts within which neoliberalism’s political and economic rationality was worked out. In the larger fields of power and authority, the then emerging technologies of communication such as the telegraph were mobilised by the colonial states and the capitalist enterprise involving scientific institutions, cartels, private corporations, missionaries and other social actors, etc. The article traces the imperial–colonial contexts of capitalism focusing on the development of media and communication technologies, in particular, telegraph – shaped by the scientific studies in electricity and magnetism, and the discovery of electromagnetic spectrum – across the state-market-science nexus. To this end, the article posits that the developments in cable and undersea telegraphy show that neoliberalism is not a break from colonial capitalism but a mutation. Extending analytic and theoretical insights from scholarship from multiple disciplines, and explicating from secondary literature and their archival sources, I investigate capitalism’s consolidating commercial and financial infrastructure: trade and monetary arrangements, taxation system, public transfer, land appropriation, extraction of resources, comparing it with contemporary neoliberalism’s macroeconomic regime and ‘extractive’ institutions. Finally, the article discusses the specific ways in which the telegraph and the colonial communication and transportation networks have endured and underpin the contemporary infrastructural projects in the Global South.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2025.2546665

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