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Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications
Author(s): Jacob Ward (Author)
- Publisher: The MIT Press
- Publication Date: February 6, 2024
- Language: English
- Print length: 344 pages
- ISBN-10: 0262546299
- ISBN-13: 9780262546294
Book Description
When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In
Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales.In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately,
Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.Editorial Reviews
Review
—Valérie Schafer, Professor, University of Luxembourg
“With profound insight and clarity, Visions of a Digital Nation illustrates how Britain navigated private and public ownership during the world-historical collision between computing and communications technologies.”
—Andrew L. Russell, Officer-in-Charge, Dean, and Professor of History, SUNY Polytechnic Institute; coauthor of Circuits, Packets, and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications, 1968-1988
About the Author
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