News from Around the World: The Newspapers of Buenos Aires in the Age of the Submarine Cable, 1866–1900

Abstract

This essay examines newspapers in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires in order to analyze the effects of the submarine telegraph cable. After a brief description of the cable's installation, I analyze how international news was circulated, focusing particularly on the role of Havas, the first European press agency to provide such news to South America. The analysis focuses on two dimensions of the submarine cable's effect: changes in the spatial breadth of news coverage, and the acceleration of news circulation. In critical dialogue with the scholarly literature on this topic, the essay argues that the incorporation of the press into the submarine cable network was part of a long process that introduced extremely fragmented representations of the world and placed new reading demands on South American news consumers.