Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the early 20th Century

The Fellowship is concerned with the ways in which critical, evidence-based, and holistic historical research on communicative pasts in colonial spaces helps us to rethink and revise dominant theoretical and conceptual approaches, and disrupts received histories to allow a more inclusive study of media and communication. Considering that the core of Westcentrism is historical and its normative assumptions rely on a history that is written with the colonial margins in absentia, it aims to bring history of a colonial margin to the centre of decolonial research in the discipline.

The Fellowship focuses on telecommunications, upon which our current digital networks were erected, and British telecommunications, which were world leading by the 20th century and Mesopotamia, whose telecommunicative pasts largely remain unknown. It investigates the role British networks played in the production and negotiation of borders, sovereignty and colonial spatiality in Mesopotamia between 1900s and 1930s.

By exposing the little-known impact and legacies of British networks in the region, the project aims to reveal the epistemological force of geopolitical and regional histories and the Middle East as a locality of knowledge-production to provide a temporally and spatially inclusive understanding and conceptualisation of media and communications.

The period between 1900 and 1932 saw a geopolitical, discursive and cartographical shift in Mesopotamia in its evolution from a space off the map in the British imaginary to the ostensibly independent nation-state of Iraq, with borders and territorial control structured by the British presence in the region, as well as related geopolitical struggles and contestations. In partnership with the British Telecom Global Archives and the PK Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications, the project will use archival and documentary records to reveal the various communicative actors, the power relations and conflicts, imaginations, plans and practices involving British networks in Mesopotamia in the making of a colonial spatiality.

Through various outputs, generated in collaboration with partner organisations, the Fellowship will steer research infrastructure in the UK towards an inclusive media and communications study using historical research on the Middle East and other understudied areas. Outputs will include scholarly writings such as a monograph and two research articles, as well as impact-driven activities such as a workshop, a podcast and a digital gallery.

The methods of digital storytelling and digitised archival records will be used to narrate the forgotten history and legacy of British networks in Mesopotamia and related conflicts.

The Fellowship is positioned at the intersection of critical media and communications studies, area studies focused on the Middle East and historical study. It draws on the cosmologies of critical scholarship, which emphasise that colonialism is not limited to the material, economic and physical territorialisation of colonial spaces, but also includes imaginations, perceptions and knowledge-systems about the space, place, and peoples of colonised regions that legitimise colonial control over territories.

By unmasking the entanglement between colonialism and communications in historical time, the project will extend critical scholarship to reveal how colonial pasts in world communications inform the dominant theoretical and conceptual understandings of media and communication. By re-contextualising the study of communications in colonial margins rather than merely in the colonial centres, the project will seek to re-conceptualise media and communications to be inclusive of heterogeneous communicative experiences, imaginaries and struggles.

In collaboration with the partner organisations, it will also contribute to the decolonisation of the archives and help to foster new research on the world's communicative past in understudied areas from a decolonial perspective.