The Centre for Comparative Modernities is delighted to announce the first session in its Spring Term 2024/25 term card for its Postgraduate and Early Careers Workshop Series.
Session 1: Technological Modernities [18 February 2025]
Submarine Sovereignty in the Mediterranean: The Case of the Libyan Submarine Telegraph
Ada Ferraresi, University of Seville
This dissertation investigates submarine telegraphy in the late modern Mediterranean, focusing on Italy, Libya, and the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, to reveal how submarine infrastructures facilitated boundary-making technopolitics and competing claims to “submarine” sovereignty. By engaging a Science and Technology Studies (STS) framework, this research reframes Mediterranean studies within colonial historiography, interrogating the intersections of technology, environment, and geopolitics. Drawing on multilingual archival materials—including Arabic, Italian, Ottoman, and British sources—it highlights Libyan agency while exposing the transregional dynamics that prefigured settler-colonialism in the region.
Submarine telegraphy, central to nineteenth-century oceanographic projects, catalyzed a “scramble for the seabed,” with European powers using the Mediterranean seabed as a contested space for colonial expansion. British telegraph companies, for instance, linked London to Bombay while navigating territorial sovereignties, positioning telegraphy as a tool of modernization to legitimize colonial centralization. The British Eastern Telegraph Company’s 1861 connection between Tripoli and Malta made Libya a strategic Mediterranean node, while British control over submarine technology marginalized other powers.
This study situates Libya within broader Mediterranean frameworks, challenging nationalist and colonial narratives that isolate it from interconnected histories with the Maghrib, the Sahara, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. It argues that submarine telegraphy was instrumental in shaping modernity in the region by facilitating technological, geopolitical, and environmental transformations. Ottoman and Italian control over telegraphic links during the 1912 Italo-Turkish War prefigured Italian settler-colonial domination, as Italy severed Ottoman lines to establish new ones aligned with settler ambitions. By foregrounding Libyan responses to these infrastructures, this research reveals how submarine telegraphy contributed to a modernity defined by colonial territorialization, technological innovation, and contested sovereignties, situating the Mediterranean as a central stage of late modern imperial dynamics.
A Mosaic Assembled Piecemeal: Imagining Japanese Bridges in Victorian Britain
Zoe Shipley, Durham University
This paper explores the image of Japanese bridges in Victorian Britain, the literary and artistic works that contributed to the formation of this image, and how it was used as an ideal model against which Victorian travellers in Japan formed value judgements on actual bridges they encountered. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including travelogues of visitors to Japan and Japanese-inspired art, this paper recreates how a mosaic image of the Japanese bridge was assembled piecemeal through fragments of information. Finally, this paper will consider the extent to which the technology of bridges fits into the larger Victorian imaginary of Japan.
Bridge construction had a long and rich tradition in Japan—both physically and symbolically—with structures, such as Uji bridge, that dates back to the seventh century, being a reoccurring motif in both literature and art. The Meiji period (1868-1912), was a pivotal moment in the development of bridge technology in Japan, Western engineering ideas regarding bridge building came into contact with the pre-existing Japanese tradition and the scope of what a Japanese bridge could be was redefined with the introduction of new materials, new functions, and new designs. In this paper I will argue that Victorians evaluated these newly-constructed bridges against the standard of their image of the Japanese bridge, which, because it was formed primarily through art, valued aesthetics over functionality.
All sessions will be held online at 14:00-15:30 UK Time via Microsoft Teams
Meeting ID: 364 338 920 501
Password: 22ti2nn2