Control and development of telecommunications were the supporting pillars of the British Empire. Several scholars have demonstrated how Her Majesty’s Government upheld a monopoly on these technologies (from telegraphy to wireless radio) in order to assert its influence on dominions and colonies alike in strategic, military, and economic terms. Anduaga’s volume focuses on a key moment, the 1924 advent of short-wave radio transmission and elucidates its revolutionary implications.

During the interwar years, the management of telecommunications within the empire underwent a decisive transformation. First, the introduction of short-waves convinced the government to replace the telegraphy network and removed its reticence toward the adoption of wireless technology, which had been partly due to the shortcomings of long-wave transmission. Second, from 1924 the industrial potential of wireless technologies came to the fore, thereby propelling the development of the radio industry and, at the same time, highlighting the need for more education and training facilities devoted to radio engineering. Finally, the new wireless technology functioned as a catalyst for studies of the upper atmosphere as there was an urgency to better understand its ionization properties (an essential requirement for radio transmission). This was the element that convinced experts of the layered structure of the newly dubbed “ionosphere.” Anduaga mobilizes an impressive quantity of published and unpublished documents that successfully demonstrates how the exercise of political control was entangled with technological prowess and the harnessing of scientific knowledge.

However, this is a compelling volume that would greatly benefit from a more cohesive narrative structure. A reader would be better off first reading the epilogue and the postscript as they clarify the author’s ambitions much better than the introduction. In the postscript, Anduaga states his dissatisfaction with previous historical work (especially that of historian and physicist C. Stewart Gillmor) that explains the emergence of studies on the ionosphere exclusively in cultural terms, thereby overlooking the importance of social, economic, and (geo-)political determinants. In the epilogue Anduaga elucidates his claim by showing that short-wave transmission created a sense of urgency to find more convincing explanations for the structure of the atmosphere. These necessities paved the way to transforming sets of untested hypotheses and models in pervasive theories and contributing to verifying the image of the layered ionosphere. Clarifying these intentions at the beginning of the volume would have made it easier for the reader to follow the account. Moreover, the chapters provide an overwhelming amount of detail on the roles of key actors, institutions, and technological artifacts. This feature might well be of benefit to future scholars, who may use the volume as a reference work. But it does not help those who wish to get a sense of the main threads of the story from its inception.

The first chapter portrays the pre-1924 state of research on the atmosphere and wireless technologies. Chapter 2 reveals how in that year Guglielmo Marconi’s radio company successfully promoted the development of short-wave transmission technology and lobbied government officials for its widespread adoption in the management of telecommunications. Equally persuasive are the two following chapters, which look at the political and scientific relationship between Britain and Australia in order to promote a better understanding of the role of wireless communications in imperial relations. In particular, Anduaga shows that although Australian experts played a key role in pioneering wireless transmission and investigating the ionosphere, their contribution was never fully acknowledged because of their peripheral position, in terms of both geography and prestige, in the imperial scientific community. Moreover, the Australian government was unable to capitalize on this scientific dexterity and ultimately succumbed to the plans for the adoption of short-wave transmission on British terms. In what is definitely the most absorbing part of the volume (184–90), we learn that some prominent Australians sought to propagandize the empire as an ellipse having two focal points (London and Sydney), exactly when any influence on the future of telecommunications appeared to be out of their hands. In fact (and disappointingly from the Australian point of view), the geometry of power defining imperial telecommunications had by then gone “pear-shaped.”

Geopolitical considerations associated with the development of radio transmission shaped imperial relations with New Zealand and Canada as well. But the analysis of these circumstances is less convincing than the study of Australian affairs. In chapters 5 and 6, which are devoted to these countries and their radio industries, we learn a great deal about the ways in which short-waves fostered the proliferation of firms affiliated with U.S. corporations. And we see how this development hampered the spread of research facilities devoted to research on the ionosphere similar to those by then thriving in Australia.

To sum up, although the general thrust of Anduaga’s argument is persuasive and based on an impressive amount of evidence, the story does not always flow smoothly enough to allow the reader to appreciate fully the depth and breadth of his work. However, what definitely emerges is a novel account of the ways in which, during the interwar period, science and technology shaped (and were shaped by) the relations between Britain and its colonies, which defined trajectories of innovative research, international relations, and industrial progress.