Growing Interdependence. During the nineteenth century a series of technological innovations and political transformations dramatically reshaped communications at a global level. As a result of industrialization and imperialism, fundamentally entwined processes, European nations extended their sovereignty over non-European communities. They explored Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, exploited the natural resources of colonized regions, and exported manufactured goods to colonial markets that had been opened up by exploration, conquest, and missionary activity. Communities previously separated by both physical and cultural distance were brought into sustained and close contact by both the technologies of the Industrial Revolution (including the electric telegraph, the steamship, and the railway) and a new and aggressive age of European imperialism.

Shrinking and Accelerating World. These new forms of communication and transport connected communities in ways that were unimaginable in the middle of the eighteenth century, when both transport and communication were relatively slow and inefficient...