Simon Potter's impressively researched book adds considerably to the literature of both imperial studies and media history. He looks closely at the creation of an informal press system involving Britain and its four Dominions: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. These colonies were closely linked to London, and each of them had flourishing local press structures. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as overall imperial ties appeared to loosen as a result of the Boer War and other events, the connections between metropolitan journalism and that of the Dominions shifted, paradoxically, in the other direction. Commercial linkages and the rise of modern technologies, notably the use of underwater cables, brought an “imperial press system” into closer existence, though, as Potter demonstrates, in ways that were subtle and complex.

This volume reflects a sharp disagreement with those historians of empire who play down ethnic and regional differences and make sweeping assertions about the rise of an anticolonial nationalism in the early twentieth century. Likewise, the interpretation of Benedict Anderson in his influential book Imagined Communities (London, 1993), namely, that the rise of the press enabled people to “imagine” themselves as part of a national community, is rejected as too simplistic. In both instances, Potter argues, the reality was less easily predicted. Central and local governments, private commercial interests, and representatives of the press interacted in ways that frequently compromised and canceled out each other's interests. There was no onward, progressive movement either for or against empire; rather, a set of clashing pressure groups existed that imparted a slow accretion of movement in the direction of a more unified press system.

According to Potter, centralizing pressures ultimately won out because of the primacy of London, which in the late Victorian decades emerged as the world's leading information center. Every facet of the media moved through the publishing networks of London, from a powerful newspaper press that encompassed both elite and popular newspapers and magazines to the strong influence of the Reuters news agency, which communicated knowledge to every area of the globe. Journalists moved easily from Fleet Street to the Dominions and in reverse, and underwater cables moved millions of words at rapid speed from the Thames River across the oceans of the world. Potter is very good at delineating the complexities of this process, which applied less efficiently to Canada than to the other Dominions because American journalism, by reason of proximity and commercial energy, often acted as a proxy for its British competitor. What this all meant was that inhabitants of London, Manchester Glasgow, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg, and Toronto read pretty much the same words, imbibed familiar interpretations of the news, and gazed at identical pictures while seated around the breakfast table. In this sense, an unstructured “imperial press system” gradually came to the fore, marked by local differences but bound together by centralizing pressures.

Potter's research is formidable. He has, it would seem, scoured every conceivable archive and collection of letters and has worked diligently in at least six countries and four continents. Archives are crucial to his labors because, in the most positive sense, this book is an institutional history. He is little interested in cultural developments and not particularly engrossed in the detailed politics of empire. Instead, he concentrates his formidable analytical powers on the economic and technological structures underlying the struggle for media dominance, both within Britain and in each of the Domnions. Broadly, as he interprets events, governments battled against private interests, while provincial groups were ranged against metropolitan forces. Costs fell slowly, cable technology gained an increasing grip on overseas journalism, and new types of associations and pressure groups such as press clubs emerged to participate in the struggle for dominance.

Commercial interests, in this view, inevitably gained the upper hand. If there is an overriding thesis to this book, it is the primacy of the profit motive. Potter takes into account a multiplicity of factors when explaining the rise of the “imperial press system”; yet in almost every instance, he espies the successful maneuvers of those seeking and accumulating wealth. Newspaper proprietors, investors, publishers, advertisers, and local luminaries were all, it seems, swept up in the ethos of this new commercial world. To be sure, Potter is right about much of this. Although “commercialization” has become too facile a mode of descriptive analysis, it does explain a great deal about the transformation of both empire and journalism. Still, the sparse, occasionally inadequate reference to culture and politics (described by Potter as “articulators” of economic interests) when explaining a phenomenon such as the rise of a mass-circulation press in the late nineteenth century detracts more than a little from what is otherwise an outstanding contribution to the history of the period.