Abstract
The Wireless World is an ambitious attempt to write a global history of international radio broadcasting. It is also ambitious because it is co-authored by seven historians. These authors have accomplished an extremely rare and impressive feat by producing a coherent, well-organized volume that makes important interventions into the history of radio and the global history of media. More broadly, the book makes a methodological intervention by showing that historians can write together and by providing a model of how this can be done.
Drawing on histoire croisée, the authors seek to move beyond histories focusing on institutions or politics by including aspects such as infrastructures (chapter 2), programming content (chapter 6), listener reception (chapter 7), and soundscapes (chapter 8). Despite having seven authors, the book reads impressively coherently. This is in large part due to a structure that combines thematic chapters with two case studies at the end of each chapter. The case studies run a few pages each to provide vivid vignettes to illustrate points made within chapters. For example, after Friederike Kind-Kovács’ chapter on broadcasting and internationalism, Nelson Ribeiro provides a case study on Portuguese colonial broadcasting and Simon Potter writes one on Radio Luxembourg and Allied propaganda at the close of Second World War. That unusual structure enables the authors to build on their strengths of very different geographical foci and to combine a thematic overview within chapters with deep dives within case studies.
The authors examine the last century of international broadcasting but focus on the 1920s and 1930s, which they see as the period that established ‘many of the essential and enduring features of twentieth-century international broadcasting', such as the centrality of the state or unequal access to radio around the world (p. 20). Each chapter focuses on those two decades before tracing how those foundations continued into the postwar period. This enables the authors to highlight continuing global inequalities and to show the uneven spread of newer technologies such as short-wave radio. For example, only one-third of the 378 million radios outside of the United States and Canada could receive short-wave in the late 1960s (p. 41). This chronological approach accomplishes several goals: it highlights the long-standing effects of the imperial origins of much international broadcasting; it decentres Second World War; and it provides a model for thinking about how to write media histories over longer stretches of time rather than default to periodizations based on wars or political regimes.
Throughout, the authors operate with a nuanced understanding of how broadcasting both connects and excludes, seeing its history as one ‘of connectedness and entanglement', as well as ‘limits and inequalities' (p. 30). Chapters both trace what scholars do know and highlight what they do not, particularly the lack of work on places outside of Europe and North America. As Vincent Kuitenbrouwer notes in his Afterword, this ‘reflects persistent inequalities within academia' and also points to the need to ‘“decolonize” the historiography of international broadcasting, both by questioning the conceptual and theoretical frameworks that have formed the basis for existing scholarship, and by expanding empirical research to cover new places, topics, and source material' (p. 273). There is even a relative lack of scholarship on Soviet and Chinese international broadcasting, even though in the early 1970s the USSR, China, and the United States together produced over forty percent of international broadcast hours (p. 25).
The chapters also show the value of bringing together scholars with different geographical specializations to tease out what is and is not distinctive about different national and imperial systems. A global approach shows, for example, the often anomalous nature of British and American international broadcasting, which were not as separate from the state as it is sometimes portrayed. As Nelson Ribeiro puts it, ‘continuity and similarity, across “free” and authoritarian broadcasting systems, may end up looking more important than change and institutional divergence' (p. 72).
The final substantive chapter of the volume showcases some of the strengths of this volume: its synthetic nature, global purview, and illuminating case studies. The chapter by Andrea Stanton examines soundscapes, defined as ‘the totality of the aural features of a particular location' (p. 235). Stanton uses the concept to explore how sounds fostered communities, whether among BBC Empire Service listeners or the South African opposition, while highlighting work by Jennifer Stoever on how broadcasting in the United States helped to create ‘sonic protocols' for racialized voices. Rebecca Scales’ case study uses newspapers and memoirs innovatively to explore Costes and Bellonte's transatlantic flight in 1930 as a ‘communal sonic event' in Paris (p. 256), while David Clayton's case study examines how jamming reshaped soundscapes. The two case studies provide fruitful examples for how historians could explore further aspects of soundscapes, while building on the broader points in the chapter.
For those of us interested in approaches to co-writing, it is a shame that the authors do not provide any indication of how they arrived at their book's structure nor how they divided up the work. How, for example, did they decide which case studies to write and where to place them? Why did they decide to have single-authored chapters rather than try to co-write as pairs or trios? It would also have been interesting to know if there were disagreements of interpretation or arguments that fell by the wayside because not all authors concurred. As historians co-write so comparatively rarely, it would have been very instructive to know how these seven scholars pulled off this project so successfully.
Overall, the seven authors are to be congratulated for a fascinating book that is certain to become a standard in the field. For anyone wishing to understand international broadcasting, this work is the place to start.