Mapping World Communication [antikvár]

Preface to the English Edition Modern nationalism appeared in continental Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution. This was also the era of a new, modern type of imperialist aggression. In 1798, the expeditionary army of General Bonaparte, the future Emperor Napoleon I, landed in Alexandria on the political pretext of striking at England through India. He was accompanied by an auxiliary corps composed of more than 150 artists, engineers, and scholars of all disciplines. Their mission was "progress and the propagation of the Enlightenment in Egypt." For over four years, under military escort, these shock troops of specialists, gathered at the Institut d'Egypte, drew up an inventory of riches—past, present, and potential—of the Land of the Pharaohs, endeavoring to make people "forget, through the benefits of peace, the miseries of conquest." Communication was at the vanguard of this effort. Participating in the adventure were 23 printers; an "Orientalist" directed the Oriental Printing Office; its two presses, one of which was equipped with Arabic characters borrowed from the Vatican, printed proclamations and bulletins in Arabic, Greek, and Turkish, and two periodicals in French. Optical telegraph stations—which had just been invented and put into use in France—were built. A commission was created to study the feasibility of a project for a great canal from Suez to the Mediterranean. Cut to the end of the nineteenth century, when communication was consecrated as the "agent of civilization." Its universality was that of the Victorian Empire. From railway networks, the electric telegraph, and underwater cable as well as the new Suez interoceanic route and steam navigation was stitched together an image of the world as a vast "organism," all of whose parts were in solidarity. Networks covering the globe be-