Communications Technology, Crime and Regulation: A Historical Perspective

This thesis explores the interactions between communication technology, crime, and regulation through an historic perspective. Specifically, it is concerned with the electric telegraph, and how its social incorporation facilitated crime, and the resulting regulatory response. It seeks to sustain an increasing tendency in the literature to refer to the electric telegraph as a comparator to the internet effect, through the use of systematic archival research. This thesis is concerned with three central questions: how did the social incorporation of the telegraph facilitate crime; what crimes did telegraphy facilitate, and by whom; and how was telegraph facilitated crime regulated? It is therefore concerned with the social life of the telegraph, how it influenced crime, and the regulatory efforts to either prevent or respond to telegraph-facilitated crime. In answering these questions, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach, connecting criminological, legal, regulatory, and historical scholarship, tracing the incorporation of the electric telegraph and its interactions with crime and regulation through an approach that is grounded in use of the technology as its organising concept. This thesis reveals a social transformation that in turn influences the ways that crime is experienced. Further, it identifies a pluralised approach to the regulation of telegraph facilitated crime, which it maintains have long-term consequences. By considering the relationship between crime, communications technology, and regulation through an historical perspective, continuities relevant to contemporary understanding of this relationship are revealed. This thesis therefore makes a methodological, as well as a conceptual, contribution to the literature