Wiring the ‘New West’: Media Infrastructure, Imperial Sovereignty, and the American Pacific Cable, 1870–1903

In the latter third of the nineteenth century, pursuit of a U.S.-owned underseas telegraph cable spanning the Pacific Ocean became a matter of national military, commercial, and political priority. This proposed Pacific Cable project prompted at least fifty-four pieces of Congressional legislation, dozens of corporate schemes, and millions of dollars of capital raised. In 1903, the completion of a cable linking San Francisco, Honolulu, and Manila prompted celebratory rhetoric heralding a new age of American power in the Pacific. This article excavates the Pacific Cable project’s central place in the history of American Pacific expansion, tracing the path of the cable as a heuristic for understanding the interlinked logics of U.S. continental expansion, settler colonialism, and overseas empire. I argue that attention to both the material and affective registers of the Pacific Cable project reveals the role of transpacific media infrastructure in the consolidation of the American Pacific.