Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Revolutionary Warfare
of the electric telegraph in the 1840s meant that the transmission of
news could now be done more rapidly than the older methods of
pigeon and semaphore. The development of a global cable network
and the emergence of the great news agencies such as Reuters
greatly accelerated the speed of international communication and
improved the coverage of news from all around the world. By the
end of the century, with the advent of cinema and radio, this
communications revolution – which we are still undergoing today
– was in full flight.
Examples mainly from the British experience have been chosen
because, even though one could repeat the exercise for any other
nation, Britain was the country that emerged as the unrivalled
leader in the field of political propaganda and, in the twentieth
century, the undisputed master of war propaganda. This will be a
startling claim to those (mainly British people, it must be said) who
believe that, of all the nations, Britain was, and remains, the most
reluctant of the world’s propagandists. In Britain, propaganda is
something that other people do, an ‘un-English’ activity associated
with subverting freedom of speech, action, and thought. Yet in the
nineteenth century, Britain’s unique position enabled her to develop
a system of media manipulation both at home and abroad that was
to serve her well in the century that followed. As the cradle of the
industrial revolution comparatively free from the internal upheavals
threatening other powers, and as the creator of a genuinely
world-wide empire, this small group of islands off the northwestern
coast of Europe was able to develop a position of power
and influence within the world communications system that was
matched only by her position as the world’s leading power. Her farflung
empire, from Scotland to Singapore, was maintained as much
by effective communications as by the efficiency of the British
Army and the Royal Navy. The development of the ‘all red’ cable
network enabled London to communicate its decisions and ideas to
those scattered points on the world map shaded in the appropriate
imperial colour. If British power was to be sustained it was vital for
the Empire to ‘think British’.
At home, more and more people were beginning to think politics.
The expansion in the size of the electorate by the 1832 and 1867
Reform Acts – though more modest than implied in most school
textbooks – broadened the base of political power and helped to
diffuse political unrest. Newspapers became an intermediary