How was radio used to project British, Dutch, Portuguese and French imperial power and influence during the twentieth century? Who possessed radio sets in British colonies in Asia and Africa, and how was the infrastructure of transmission and reception financed? What was broadcast in Palestine during the British Mandate, and who listened? What role, more generally, has radio played across the Middle East during the twentieth century? How did wireless breach the Iron Curtain during the Cold War?  Propaganda, soft power, cultural diplomacy – how can we best describe the role of radio as an international persuader across the twentieth century? 

We had a long list of questions to think about when we met in mid-April: a group of seven radio historians from across Europe and the United States, getting together for the first time on a bright sunny day in Bristol, at Brunel’s mighty ss Great Britain, to plan three years of events exploring the global history of radio. 

With the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust, we are going to hold a series of workshops and meetings in York, Amsterdam, Denver, Portugal, and Regensburg. Over our two-day inaugural meeting in Bristol, at the ss Great Britain and at the University of Bristol, we worked out some of the priorities for research and discussion.

 We want to link up for example with other historians who have started to think about radio monitoring, the way that broadcasters and states have sought to keep track of what stations in different countries were doing, and how they have used this information for intelligence and propaganda purpose. Scholars have not written much about this important aspect of the history of surveillance.   

We also agreed at Bristol that we face challenges in dealing with the patchy nature of the radio archives. Particularly in the early decades of international broadcasting, much material was transmitted live, and much of what was recorded was destroyed after use. The Second World War also inflicted a fair bit of damage on the archives. We are hoping that monitoring might mean that some programme material has survived in unlikely places. Maybe the best place to find information about programmes broadcast by any one particular country is in the archives of another. While we were all together in Bristol we planned a series of collaborative research trips to investigate this possibility. 

The Bristol meeting made it clear that there are people working in a wide range of disciplines who we would be eager to link up with: scholars in media studies working on ‘soundscapes’ and ‘media archaeologies’; politics and international relations, particularly the study of geopolitics, soft power and cultural diplomacy; and the history of technology. 

We were all also really keen to link up with people outside universities: people who work or used to work in the world of international radio; people who are interested in memorabilia, programmes or old radio stations; people who have ideas about how to preserve and map the history and heritage of international radio.  Please do get in touch via Twitter or the project email address.

 

Dr Simon Potter, Principal Investigator