Visions of a Digital Nation

Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications

Paper Book

Why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain's telecommunications infrastructure.

When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales.

In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward's approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain's nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

Conditions of Use

CC BY-NC-SAThis book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA). You can download the ebook Visions of a Digital Nation for free.

Title
Visions of a Digital Nation
Subtitle
Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications
Publisher
Author(s)
Published
2024-02-06
Edition
1
Format
eBook (pdf, epub, mobi)
Pages
352
Language
English
ISBN-10
0262546299
ISBN-13
9780262375528
License
CC BY-NC-SA
Book Homepage
Free eBook, Errata, Code, Solutions, etc.
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