Icy Infrastructures and Colonial Legacies: Tracing the Cryo-History of Transatlantic Telecommunication Infrastructure in the Arctic

Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and postcolonial studies, this paper follows the case of the discarded 160-year-old plans for “The Northern Route” - a transatlantic telegraph that would have placed Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands at the center of transatlantic communication in the 19th century. I trace how notions of the Arctic Sublime, a dependency on “credible ice witnesses,” local ice knowledges and the “politics of comparison” influenced the eventual abandonment of the route, where Arctic territories were (dis)regarded and considered as mere “substrate” for infrastructure. I argue that this cryo-history of Arctic telecommunication infrastructures highlights how colonial logics about who to connect, and where, still influence infrastructural development in the region today.