The law of infrastructure: jurisdictional accumulation and neo-imperialism at British and French undersea cable landing sites

This talk compares communications cable landing sites and local economies in Bude (UK) and Marseille (France), sites that have become the two most important European hubs for cable connectivity. The project investigates the importance of the imperial legal history of these sites and the enduring or new role of imperialism’s actors, structures and logical imperatives in shaping local and global economies and jurisdictions. Bude today replaces other sites in Cornwall such as Porthcunno, where the first telegraph cable linked Britain to India in 1870 and in 1872 became part of the Eastern Telegraph Company, which eventually merged into Cable & Wireless Limited in 1934. Telegraph died in the 1970s, but in 1988, fibre-optic cables started to land in the region again, reviving a century’s old economy. In Marseille, the imperial history of cable landing sites is less visible but linked to Marseille’s reliance on consuls as specific intermediary actors similar to trading companies. The comparison will allow a better understanding of the revival of different but nevertheless classic forms of imperialism as literal foundations to our global digital economy, reshaping public and private domains of legal imperialism through key sub-sovereign actors and infrastructures.

Speaker

Maïa Pal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University (UK). She is the author of Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Deutscher Prize, and most recently of “Capital is Dead. Long Live Capital! A Political Marxist Analysis of Capitalism and Infrastructure” with Neal Harris (in TripleC: Communication, Capitalism, and Critique, 2024). She is a member of the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.