Ships, Serials, and Infrastructures of Empire in the Nineteenth Century

The drive toward precision, punctuality, and an accurate global mapping of the ocean has always been in tension with the forces that undermine and undercut the attempt: human failure, bad weather, broken instruments, bad luck, and so on. The serial labor of embedding infrastructure is risky and requires both improvisatory skills and persistence. The ships that paid out the telegraph cable, and the many kinds of serial writing that took place onboard these ships, were all part of the infrastructural endeavor of the nineteenth century, and they anticipated the digital as much as the cables did themselves. If we think of their role as actively and serially remaking positionality in this uneven imperial world, we can think of serial data produced onboard moving ships in the nineteenth century as shaping an infrastructure that powerfully anticipates the digital.