Stephenson’s piece is a classic, but it was written in 1996, when things were very different in the tech industry and geopolitically. Much more up to date (and with an explicit debt to Stephenson) is Samanth Subramanian, The Web Beneath The Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World. Well worth a read to see what’s changed since Stephenson.
I've been using Hacker News to get book recommendations. Recently I started checking out the books mentioned in comments on topics I'm interested in learning more about.
I've added this book to my list, and it looks like a short read.
Many of the weirder geopolitical parts like how large numbers of cables are all laid across Egypt to get from Europe to middle east -> south asia still remain significant factors. The part that is most dated is the cables being built by exclusively by big traditional telecom companies, when this was written in 1996 the idea of Microsoft or Google or Facebook or others bankrolling a submarine cable from Brazil to Europe was very far away.
The new and novel thing in 1996 from the author's perspective is cables being built not by a PTT type "telephone company" (the Bell System/AT&T, BT, France Telecom, etc) but a new entity that intended to build the cables to sell capacity to multiple telcos.
> The British involvement, then, was more catalytic than anything else. They didn't own the rubber plantations. They merely bought the rubber on an open market from Chinese brokers who in turn bought it from producers of various ethnicities. The market was just a few square blocks of George Town where British law was enforced, i.e. where businessmen could rely on a few basics like property rights, contracts, and a currency.
In 2026 this is a surprisingly non-pearl clutching take on British influence abroad.
Two notes of interest, it only covers "British influence abroad" at one specific location for a relatively short interval of time, and it neatly avoids looking too deeply into a classic of British colonialism; the divide and conquer approach of strategically favouring some over others to push any resulting unrest at arms length away from the actual British.
But it does mention the most classic classic: the outcomes of post-British colonies are incredible compared to either no colonialism or another power colonising.
> the outcomes of post-British colonies are incredible
By what metric? Recall that not all people value the same things.
The outcome of British colonialism in Tasmania was 100% extinction of locals - I mean sure, you can call that incredible as you did, but that was never a word used by Truganini
Jamaica, sure, greatest Winter Olympic team ever .. but hardly the poster child for colonialism and impossible to claim as "better off" than sans or alt colonialism.
Uganda, well, ... enough said.
We can likely agree that the expanding British Empire had a tremendous eye for real estate, resources, and location. The bulk of places colonised by the British had plenty of potential for exploitation and exploited they largely were.
The arc of such colonies once the sun set and the Empire retracted was varied, the lucky ones were able to reclaim local control of their own resources and relations, a good many were largely stripped and left to flounder locked into ongoing situations not of their making.
I’d say India has done really well, and that’s partly in credit to the British. A lot of the infrastructure that India used to succeed was inherited from the Raj, such as a professional Army that has never interfered in politics, a competent Civil Service, a Parliamentary style system where minorities have had a reasonable say.
Most important of all, and directly attributable to British influence was getting rid of princely states that owed their allegiance to the British crown. Britain made it clear that they would not accept independent states and every princely state would have to accede to India or Pakistan.
Britain really tried to help India (and Pakistan) succeed. The blame for some of the failures and mistakes can’t be attributed to the British (Indian economic policy, Pakistani policy in East Pakistan), but they deserve partial credit.
People who aren’t Indian can’t understand how remarkable it is that India has stayed united and functional. Indians have diversity within similar to Europe, but the country remains united. A big part of that is that the current Indian state is a successor to the British Raj, which in turn was a successor to the Mughal Raj. The longer India is ruled from Delhi, the more normal it feels normal.
This unity is the source of Indian success. Without it India would resemble Africa more than Europe. More resources would have been wasted fighting wars within India and all of India would still be struggling with poverty, famine, starvation instead of manufacturing iPhones.
China, the country was never a colony under British rule - perhaps you're thinking of the island leased to Britain, Hong Kong.
China did have interactions with Britain, disputes over trade, access, addictive drug running, gunboat diplomacy et al. but these usually fall under British Imperialism rather than British Colonialism.
I can't believe this article does not mention what I think is the most puzzling part of the repair: the delicate process by which the individual fibers are FUSED TOGETHER in a way that maintains near perfect total internal refraction.
You mean fusion splicing? That's common knowledge to anyone that's done any professional fibre cabling and you can easily find reading on it. The specifics of subsea cables however are much more elusive so it makes sense the article focuses on that.
> Cables can be tapped for information, or cut to drastically slow communication between countries. A greater emphasis on government protection of the cables may be in the future.
That left me wondering now, how would that even work? The wiretapping, that is
This was a good read. I'm obsessed with undersea cables. I consider them one of the wonders of the modern world. Wikipedia says 99% of all internet traffic gets delivered via these ocean-spanning wires, just sitting along the sea floor. Almost unbelievable.
If you sink a few old ships around in the area you will never need to repair it again each two years. Extra bonus if they are exactly the same ships that you found red-handed damaging the cables.
tl;dr: They pull the damaged cable up, weld it to a new section of cable their brought, and then drop the cable with a detour to make room for the extra length.
If you havent seen it, you owe it to yoiurself to read Mother Earth, Motherboard: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
A Neal Stephenson long read about undersea cables. So good!
Stephenson’s piece is a classic, but it was written in 1996, when things were very different in the tech industry and geopolitically. Much more up to date (and with an explicit debt to Stephenson) is Samanth Subramanian, The Web Beneath The Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect our World. Well worth a read to see what’s changed since Stephenson.
I've been using Hacker News to get book recommendations. Recently I started checking out the books mentioned in comments on topics I'm interested in learning more about.
I've added this book to my list, and it looks like a short read.
Thanks. Hope I like it.
Many of the weirder geopolitical parts like how large numbers of cables are all laid across Egypt to get from Europe to middle east -> south asia still remain significant factors. The part that is most dated is the cables being built by exclusively by big traditional telecom companies, when this was written in 1996 the idea of Microsoft or Google or Facebook or others bankrolling a submarine cable from Brazil to Europe was very far away.
The new and novel thing in 1996 from the author's perspective is cables being built not by a PTT type "telephone company" (the Bell System/AT&T, BT, France Telecom, etc) but a new entity that intended to build the cables to sell capacity to multiple telcos.
About to read but your link is paywalled, here’s a copy: https://efdn.notion.site/Mother-Earth-Mother-Board-WIRED-a8f...
> The British involvement, then, was more catalytic than anything else. They didn't own the rubber plantations. They merely bought the rubber on an open market from Chinese brokers who in turn bought it from producers of various ethnicities. The market was just a few square blocks of George Town where British law was enforced, i.e. where businessmen could rely on a few basics like property rights, contracts, and a currency.
In 2026 this is a surprisingly non-pearl clutching take on British influence abroad.
Sure, it's easy enough to write in such a manner.
Two notes of interest, it only covers "British influence abroad" at one specific location for a relatively short interval of time, and it neatly avoids looking too deeply into a classic of British colonialism; the divide and conquer approach of strategically favouring some over others to push any resulting unrest at arms length away from the actual British.
But it does mention the most classic classic: the outcomes of post-British colonies are incredible compared to either no colonialism or another power colonising.
> the outcomes of post-British colonies are incredible
By what metric? Recall that not all people value the same things.
The outcome of British colonialism in Tasmania was 100% extinction of locals - I mean sure, you can call that incredible as you did, but that was never a word used by Truganini
Jamaica, sure, greatest Winter Olympic team ever .. but hardly the poster child for colonialism and impossible to claim as "better off" than sans or alt colonialism.
Uganda, well, ... enough said.
We can likely agree that the expanding British Empire had a tremendous eye for real estate, resources, and location. The bulk of places colonised by the British had plenty of potential for exploitation and exploited they largely were.
The arc of such colonies once the sun set and the Empire retracted was varied, the lucky ones were able to reclaim local control of their own resources and relations, a good many were largely stripped and left to flounder locked into ongoing situations not of their making.
I’d say India has done really well, and that’s partly in credit to the British. A lot of the infrastructure that India used to succeed was inherited from the Raj, such as a professional Army that has never interfered in politics, a competent Civil Service, a Parliamentary style system where minorities have had a reasonable say.
Most important of all, and directly attributable to British influence was getting rid of princely states that owed their allegiance to the British crown. Britain made it clear that they would not accept independent states and every princely state would have to accede to India or Pakistan.
Britain really tried to help India (and Pakistan) succeed. The blame for some of the failures and mistakes can’t be attributed to the British (Indian economic policy, Pakistani policy in East Pakistan), but they deserve partial credit.
People who aren’t Indian can’t understand how remarkable it is that India has stayed united and functional. Indians have diversity within similar to Europe, but the country remains united. A big part of that is that the current Indian state is a successor to the British Raj, which in turn was a successor to the Mughal Raj. The longer India is ruled from Delhi, the more normal it feels normal.
This unity is the source of Indian success. Without it India would resemble Africa more than Europe. More resources would have been wasted fighting wars within India and all of India would still be struggling with poverty, famine, starvation instead of manufacturing iPhones.
Most notable examples of both are China and India, where China outperforms India even despite decades of violent Communist rule.
China, the country was never a colony under British rule - perhaps you're thinking of the island leased to Britain, Hong Kong.
China did have interactions with Britain, disputes over trade, access, addictive drug running, gunboat diplomacy et al. but these usually fall under British Imperialism rather than British Colonialism.
thank you!
Thanks, I loved this article, time to re-read it again!
For anyone who wants to know more about the early history of undersea cables, I also enjoyed ‘A Thread Across the Ocean’ by John Steele Gordon.
I can't believe this article does not mention what I think is the most puzzling part of the repair: the delicate process by which the individual fibers are FUSED TOGETHER in a way that maintains near perfect total internal refraction.
You mean fusion splicing? That's common knowledge to anyone that's done any professional fibre cabling and you can easily find reading on it. The specifics of subsea cables however are much more elusive so it makes sense the article focuses on that.
> Cables can be tapped for information, or cut to drastically slow communication between countries. A greater emphasis on government protection of the cables may be in the future.
That left me wondering now, how would that even work? The wiretapping, that is
https://www.google.com/search?q=blind+mans+bluff+book
Has a good story of how it was done several decades ago. Not sure how it works these days.
I've been attempting to buy a cross section of one of these cables for a very long time. Anybody got a lead on one?
Have someone with a .edu email address to email a company that makes them.
"Repeaters are included every 40-80 km to keep the signal strong."
Does it mean that there's a ton of repeaters under the sea? Where do they get the power from?
i believe they're simply powered by the electric conductors bundled with the cable
the extra interesting part i think is how they amplify the signal without having to decode it, just optically
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...
Along the same cable. Data cables usually carry power to some degree too, for their own use.
Do they maintain the original connection between the fibers or is that not worth the effort and is a swap not a problem?
This was a good read. I'm obsessed with undersea cables. I consider them one of the wonders of the modern world. Wikipedia says 99% of all internet traffic gets delivered via these ocean-spanning wires, just sitting along the sea floor. Almost unbelievable.
Also always interesting: https://www.submarinecablemap.com
(2021)
If you sink a few old ships around in the area you will never need to repair it again each two years. Extra bonus if they are exactly the same ships that you found red-handed damaging the cables.
tl;dr: They pull the damaged cable up, weld it to a new section of cable their brought, and then drop the cable with a detour to make room for the extra length.
(This is a really meandering article!)