Katie Hindmarch-Watson. Serving a Wired World: London’s Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 288p. Hardcover, $29.95 (ISBN 978-0-5203-4473-0).

Abstract

Serving a Wired World: London’s Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital is a scholarly work, rather than one on professional practice. Library professionals have a vast range of reading available to us as information stewards and conduits in the 21st century, and we serve ourselves by including historical scholarship in the bounty of ideas we consider. This is especially true when a scholarly work provides a window into past information workers’ regulated and agentive roles in the communications systems they were charged to operate. Here, cultural historian Katie Hindmarch-Watson explores how embodied labor and categories of gender informed the nascent telecommunications industry in 19th-century London and via networks across Britain. How were these telecommunications workforces feminized and controlled through administrative processes and how did some groups push against these constraints? If these questions resonate for you, read on.