India's First Virtual Community and the Telegraph General Strike of 1908

Abstract

The telegraph strike of 1908 occurred at many nodes of the telegraph system in British India and Burma, paralysing governance and business. In this paper, I suggest that the strike was a symptom of the systemic crisis in world telegraphy faced with technological change and competition. I introduce the category of transregional economic general strike as a tool to analyse strikes in the communication sectors. The strike demonstrated the ability of one of the earliest virtual communities in India to combine and organize worker protest. This multistage strike momentarily transcended the specific, and usually rigid, distinctions of race, class, and ethnicity through the production of community-at-a-distance. The strike occurred simultaneously among different sections of workers in Rangoon, Moulmein, Calcutta, Allahabad, Agra, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Karachi, to name just a few of the places involved. Both telegraph signallers as well as the subordinate staff went on strike. By concentrating on the relationship between technological change and labour, the paper demonstrates how workers across this part of the British Empire were capable of charting a general agenda in the first decade of the twentieth century, using technology to combine and combat technological rationalization.