Publications
Articles and Book Chapters
“Wiring Markets: The Telegraph as Financial Infrastructure in the First Age of Globalization.” In The Cambridge Companion to Global Financial Infrastructure, edited by Barbara Brandl, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, and Carola Westermeier, pp. 116–127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009428118.012
Abstract:
The telegraph is often seen as one of the most important technological innovations that helped usher in an age of global financial integration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For the first time, information and capital moved at electronic speeds, enabling unprecedented growth securities arbitrage across different markets, which brought prices into equilibrium. But this framework typically adopts both a technologically determinist understanding of the telegraph and uses only long-run, macroeconomic approaches to measure the financial effects of the telegraph. This chapter instead focuses on the practicalities of operationalizing the telegraph within the financial system. How was the telegraphic infrastructure that linked financial markets built, implemented, and maintained? By focusing on the telegraph’s infrastructural operation, this chapter argues that the telegraph integrated global financial markets in profoundly unequal ways. Moreover, it was through the seemingly small technicalities of telegraphic infrastructure – like the management of electric current, the maintenance of wires, the adoption of new telegraph apparatuses, and message delivery systems – that states, financial institutions, and firms sought to exert their power over the telegraph. The results of these conflicts over telegraphic infrastructure resulted in an unequal distribution of the telegraph’s financial benefits.
“The Material Politics of Finance: The Ticker Tape and the London Stock Exchange, 1860s–1890s.” Enterprise and Society 23, no. 3 (September 2022): pp. 857–887. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2021.3
Abstract:
When the ticker tape was first invented in the 1860s, it promised a revolution in financial markets. Pricing information was now no longer solely the domain of the trading floor but was relayed continuously and simultaneously to ticker tapes long distances away from the stock exchange. Both nineteenth-century financiers, and the modern scholars who study them, have been enamored with the ticker tape and how it changed the way financial markets were perceived and experienced. However, a focus on how nineteenth-century financiers read and responded to the ticker tape has missed the real reordering of power that the ticker helped usher in. This article argues that between the 1860s and 1890s the London Stock Exchange and the Exchange Telegraph Company powerfully centralized their control over the distribution and transmission of financial information through the mundane infrastructures that underpinned the ticker tape system. Seeming technicalities, like the placement of batteries, the construction of electrical circuits, and the laying of wires and cables, were leveraged by these institutions to create a ticker tape system that distributed financial information unequally to financiers and investors throughout Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, social and political questions about who should have access to financial information and markets, and on what terms, became helplessly intertwined with the mundane technicalities of the material infrastructures of modern finance.
Reviews
Review of Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets, by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra. Modern British History 33, no. 4 (December 2022): 633–634.
Review of Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity, by Ian Hesketh. Victorian Periodicals Review 51, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 408–410.
Review of Subscribing to Faith? The Anglican Parish Magazine 1859–1929, by Jane Platt. Victorian Periodicals Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 434–437.
Review of The Telegraph and Stock Exchanges: How Innovations in Communications Technology Influenced Regional Exchanges in the United States, 1830–1860, by Sonali Garg. Technology and Culture (forthcoming 2026).
Review of Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by Nicholas Radburn. Journal of British Studies (forthcoming 2026).
In Progress
“The British Financialization of American Slavery,” article draft.
“On the Necessity of Instrumental Reason: Historical Knowledge and Anti-Utopianism in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University.” Proposal accepted for a special issue of History of the Present. Manuscript due January 2026.