Serving a Wired World

"Katie Hindmarch-Watson has delivered a gem: a history that is deeply specific yet urgently relevant to our present technological moment. In our current context of a networked world that runs on invisible and exploited labor, this story of the forgotten workers who ran London's telegraph network is more relevant than ever before. This book will be required reading for courses on the history of the internet and the history of sexuality, gender, and technology."--Mar Hicks, author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing "Full of strangeness, rich detail, and wonderfully oddball material, Serving a Wired World is an engrossing and inventive work. With sophisticated analysis and a raft of original research, it is an exceptional study of the intersection of information systems and political orders."--Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 "This brilliant book is the cutting edge of a new wave of scholarship on class and labor. With detailed and original stories of labor, gender, sexuality, and surveillance, Hindmarch-Watson offers a fresh and necessary understanding of class that shifts our understanding of the nineteenth century--and illuminates transformations in information technology and labor processes for all societies."--Anna Clark, author of Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets, 1762-1917 "Innovative and imaginative, Serving a Wired World is a pathbreaking work. Expansive in scope and meticulously attentive to complexity, this is a major scholarly contribution to the history of Britain's liberal modernity, deftly relating a complex story of urban space, social class, sexuality, and the practices of the modern telecommunications industry."--Chris Waters, author of British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914