Beyond the Means of 99 Percent of the Population: Business Interests, State Intervention, and Submarine Telegraphy

Since 1865, the International Telegraph Union (ITU) had provided the official framework for international governance through standards on technology, usage, and tariffs. Apart from the United States, the ITU assembled almost all the world's Ministries of Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones, which generally ran telegraphic landline systems. As Léonard Laborie has shown, the ITU was an important tool to foster intergovernmental cooperation--even during imperial fragmentation. +Superscript 3 -Superscript While scholarship has focused on the ITU as one of the oldest institutions of international governance on the one hand, or regulatory challenges after 1932 and the founding of the International +Italic Telecommunications -Italic Union on the other hand, little attention has been paid to the interrelation of private businesses and national infrastructure within the ITU before 1932. 4