In recent years, useful books have explored the political as well as the engineering importance of the telegraph and, especially, the transatlantic cable of the late 1860s. David Paull Nickles, a historian at the U.S. Department of State, has written a significant and interestingly researched analysis of how the telegraph and various cable systems did—or did not—change the nature of American and European diplomacy and the personal activities of those regions’ diplomats during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

the increased bureaucratization and centralization of foreign ministries, the rising importance of signals intelligence, the declining autonomy of diplomatic envoys and, perhaps most important, the accelerated speed of international crises. (p. 191)