Title: Coloniality and Communications: Introduction (Episode 1)
Creator: Burçe Çelik; Sebastian James Rose
Contributors: Sena Başöz (video production, editing)
Data Provider: Loughborough University
Provider: Coloniality and Communications
Type: Video
Format: Video (MP4)
Date: 2025
Language: English
Description: This episode introduces the research project Coloniality and Communications, outlining its central questions, archival sources, and methodological approach. Focusing on British telecommunications infrastructure in Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the early twentieth century, the video examines how communications technologies were integral to colonial state-building, surveillance, and spatial control. By foregrounding the extensive use of aerial systems—enabled by aerial photography, wireless communication, airplanes, and bombing—it asks what it means to think of air as media, or more precisely, as colonial media. Tracing the colonial legacies embedded in today’s skyborne media—from satellites to Wi-Fi and GSM—the episode argues that recognising these inheritances can sharpen our awareness of the risks embedded in contemporary media systems and help us imagine more just and equitable futures for communication.
Subject: Telecommunications history, Colonial infrastructure, Mesopotamia, Iraq, British Empire, Media history, Aerial networks, Surveillance
Spatial Coverage: Mesopotamia (Iraq)
Temporal Coverage: 1918–1932
Rights: CC BY-NC 4.0
Rights Holder: Loughborough University
Is Part Of: Coloniality and Communications – Episodes
Source Institutions: British Library; British Newspaper Archive; BT Group Archives; Imperial War Museum; The National Archives; Royal Air Force Collections
Project Context:
Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century is an AHRC funded project run by Prof. Burçe Çelik (P.I.), Dr. Sebastian James Rose (Research Associate) at Loughborough University and artist Sena Başöz.
Coloniality and Communications unveils the historical role and legacy of British telecommunications in the making of colonial spatiality in Mesopotamia and the Middle East in the early 20th century. The project aims to advance decolonial research on media and communications through the epistemological force of regional and geopolitical history. By providing historical research on the past of colonial communications, this project aims to shift Westcentric conceptions, theoretical frameworks and received histories on media and communications.
Focusing on the interplay of communications and state building in Mesopotamia and Iraq from 1918 to 1932, the project challenges and questions existing paradigms in communication studies and the history of technology by asking: How were communications repurposed by the local people as forms of resistance? What roles did communications networks play in the making of colonial and national space? How did communications infrastructures, technologies and networks produce and reproduce colonial violence and control?
Key points / chapters
- Why does the History of Communication Networks Matter for Understanding Media Today? 1:08
- The Problem: What is Missing? 2:15
- Why Focus on British Networks in Mesopotamia? 2:52
- Archival Research and Findings 4:56
- The Aerial Network 7:49
- Air as Colonial Media 9:16
- Surveillance, Spectacle, Transmission and Destruction 9:45
- Conclusion 11:33
This video was produced as part of the research project Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century.
Learn more at the project website: https://colonialcommunication.lboro.ac.uk/
Related content can be accessed at https://colonialcommunication.lboro.ac.uk/episodes/