Geographies of Information Technology From Telegraphs to Computer Networks

The role of information technology in extending the reach of institutions over large geographical territories has been a foundational important theme in business and economic history (Chandler, 1977). This panel continues this work, exploring the co-constitutive nature of technological and institutional forms in both economic governance and business enterprise. Each paper attends to the rapid circulation of information, ideas, and know-how across changing geographies. To explain these changes this panel centers business strategies: why decentralize manufacturing facilities, why avoid a fixed real estate footprint for the telegraph, and why repurpose welfare systems across state lines. The remaking of space, each paper argues, was a business decision, which in turn generated novel theories of management, control, and governance. In highlighting the geographies of information technologies and their supporting infrastructures, these papers contribute to what may be described as an emerging “spatial turn” in business history (White, 2011), as well as to recent scholarly attention to the materiality of financial markets (MacKenzie, 2008; Lipartito, 2016; Handel, 2021).