Brian Larkin, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

The Media System of Empire

In 1839 the British Colonial Office received 902 pieces of correspondence from its far-flung territories. By 1909 this number rose to 90,000, and by 1939 it passed 300,000. Empire is the extension of political power and administration across racial, linguistic, and cultural difference. In the case of the British Empire that power depended upon a communicative infrastructure of files, memos, minutes, dispatches, and other documents which enacted the practical work of drawing disparate territories into a single system. As the size and complexity of empire grew, British imperialists had to innovate new forms of storing and circulating information. My book project examines the infrastructures, protocols, circulatory forms, and storage mechanisms by which information was moved and stored at different points in British imperial history. Cumulatively, these changes formatted the civil service for a modern era of information, one that undergirded empire as an organizational system. I examine the material infrastructures of imperial information systems. This is what I term the media system of Empire.
 
Recommended Reading

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press, 2008.
—. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.
—. “The Cinematic Milieu: Technical Evolution, Digital Infrastructure, and Urban Space.” Public Culture 33, no. 3 (2021): 313–348.

Kolloquium, 07.10.2025

Filing Empire

In 1923, the Colonial Office noted they had at least six different spellings of the word ‘Mohammedan’ coming in from all over the empire. They circulated an internal memorandum asking which of these was correct and thus should be used as the standard form. I examine this memo, its attempt at standardization, the arguments it provoked, the files it spawned that circulated all over the world, as an entry point into understanding what I term the media system of empire. This refers to the infrastructures of imperial information systems, their protocols, circulatory forms, and storage systems – and how they changed over time. Ultimately, I am interested in analyzing how these infrastructures comprised the architecture that made rule, and the character of that rule, possible.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Larkin, Brian (Durham, NC, 2021)

The cinematic milieu : technological evolution, digital infrastructure, and urban space

Larkin, Brian (Palo Alto, Calif., 2013)

The politics and poetics of infrastructure

Larkin, Brian (Durham, NC [u.a.], 2008)

Signal and noise : media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria A John Hope Franklin Center Book