Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century is an AHRC funded project run by Dr. Burçe Çelik (P.I.) and Dr. Sebastian James Rose (Research Asssociate) at Loughborough University.

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:

  • 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?

  • How were communications repurposed by the local people as forms of resistance?

  • Burçe Çelik is an anticolonial researcher who engages in thinking, writing, and teaching on the politics, political economy, and history of communications. Her passion for historical research stems not only from a love of uncovering the past but also from a belief that revisiting history can transform our understanding of media and communications—especially when we attend to the omissions, erasures, and marginalizations in dominant historical narratives. For her, critical historical inquiry is fundamental to rigorous theoretical work, particularly in advancing decolonial and anticolonial perspectives within the discipline. Her recent book, Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History, challenges the widely held belief that modern communications are mere byproducts of Western capitalist modernity and other Western forces. By offering an alternative history of communication networks spanning two centuries, the book seeks to reframe dominant narratives and highlight overlooked dynamics in the development of communication systems. This book was recognized as the Runner-Up for the Best Book of 2023 in Global Communication and Social Change by the International Communication Association

  • Sebastian James Rose is a historian interested in the role and intersection of workers, colonialism and technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His research focuses on communication networks and imperial infrastructures from below, foregrounding communities, actors and spaces usually ignored in histories of technology and empire. His thesis traced the social and political history of the Indo-European Telegraph Department in Iran and the Persian Gulf and analysed the role of telegraph stations and how workers, local communities and the Qajar and Ottoman state influenced, disrupted and contested the department and its network. In 2024 he held a position as a research fellow at Linda Hall Library, Kansas City, focusing on workers movements and trade journals in US telegraph networks. Sebastian was shortlisted for the 2021 Olivette Otele Prize for his paper exploring the organisation and racialisation of telegraph workers in the IETD.

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