5 September 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100
John Handel (Baylor University)
“Finance at Telegraphic Speed: Infrastructure, Politics, and the Material Limits of Global Finance, 1840s–1920s”
The telegraph is often seen as one of the most important technological innovations that helped usher in an age of global financial integration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the first time in history, information and capital moved at electronic speeds, enabling unprecedented capital flows across space. But this framework typically adopts both a technologically deterministic understanding of the telegraph and uses only long-run, macroeconomic approaches to measure the financial effects of the telegraph. This paper instead focuses on the practicalities of operationalizing the telegraph within the financial system. How was the telegraphic infrastructure that linked financial markets built, implemented, and maintained? By focusing on the telegraph’s infrastructural operation, this paper argues that, rather than being driven by efficiency and speed, financial telegraphy was more profoundly shaped by its material limitations. The limitations of financial telegraphy then inaugurated sharp conflicts between states, markets, and firms to capture the relatively small efficiency gains telegraphy brought. These conflicts took place deep within the technical infrastructure of the global telegraphic system and seemingly small technicalities like the management of electric current, the maintenance of wires, the adoption of new telegraph apparatuses, and message delivery systems became the key sites within which a new global political economy of finance was forged.
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John Handel is an assistant professor of history at Baylor University where he teaches economic and financial history and the history of Modern Europe, especially Britain and its Empire. He received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Before arriving at Baylor he was a post-doctoral fellow in the finance department at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. His first book, The Infrastructures of Finance: The London Stock Exchange and the Making of the Modern Financial System 1801-1914, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.