The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age

摘要

In The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age, Robert MacDougall argues that AT&T's bounteous corporate archives have led scholars to tell the history of the telephone from an AT&T-centric perspective. MacDougalls history of the Independents, a movement that provided a robust alternative to AT&T in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aims to widen the range of analysis in the literature. This is not a book for those interested in a comprehensive examination of the industrial organization of the Independents, nor does it provide a systematic overview of the changing regulatory environment in which the telephone operated. Instead, MacDougall weaves a narrative of the cultural, political, and commercial forces that shaped the development of the industry in the United States and Canada. MacDougall dismisses the idea that technology primarily determined the development of the telephone industry, instead arguing that its organization was "politically constructed," with "political institutions" providing "the environments in which individual actors had to fight for their interests and plans" (p. 175). The organization of the telephone network raised questions of "independence, interconnection, and scale" that reflected "arguments about the way the country ought to be organized" (p. 17).