WIRELESS and EMPIRE AMBITION Wireless Telegraphy/Telephony And
WIRELESS AND EMPIRE AMBITION Wireless telegraphy/telephony and radio broadcasting in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, South-West Pacific (1914-1947): political, social and developmental perspectives Martin Lindsay Hadlow Master of Arts in Mass Communications, University of Leicester, 2003 Honorary Doctorate, Kazakh State National University (named after Al-Farabi), 1997 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2016 School of Communication and Arts Abstract This thesis explores the establishment of wireless technology (telegraphy, telephony and broadcasting) in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP), South-West Pacific and analyses its application as a political, social and cultural tool during the colonial years spanning the first half of the 20th century. While wireless seemed a ready-made technology for the Pacific, given its capability as a medium to transmit and receive signals instantly across vast expanses of ocean, the colonial civil servants of Britain’s Fiji-based regional headquarters, the Western Pacific High Commission (WPHC) in Suva, were slow to understand its strategic value. Conservative attitudes to governance, combined with a confidence born of Imperial rule, not to mention bureaucratic inertia and an almost complete lack of understanding of the new medium by a reluctant administration, aligned to cause obfuscation, delay and frustration. In the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, one of the most geographically remote ‘fragments of Empire’, pressures from the commercial sector (primarily planters and traders), the religious community (mission stations in remote locations), keen amateur experimenters (expatriate businessmen), wireless sales companies (Marconi and AWA Ltd.), not to mention the declaration of World War I itself, all intervened to bring about change to the stultified regulatory environment then pertaining and to ensure the introduction of wireless technology in its multitude of iterations.
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