Jacob Ward, <i>Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications</i> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024. Pp. 344. ISBN 978-0-262-54629-4. $50.00 (paperback).

s Visions of a Digital Nation examines digitalization in the Post Office and British Telecom (BT) from the 1950s to the 1990s to bring insights from the history of technology to bear on narratives of nationalization and privatization in Britain.Histories of liberalization often do not credit the critical function that technology has played in moulding political economies and Ward argues that these histories are therefore incomplete.He places telecommunications at the heart of his enquiry to contend that the history of privatization is more protracted than preceding literature has recognized.By mapping the chronology of this narrative from the mid-twentieth century, Ward resists interpreting privatization as strictly top-down.In doing so, he introduces to this history an expansive network of employees, engineers, managers and users who responded to, and helped to steer, the politics of nationalization and privatization.Ward's comprehensive coverage of this chronology produces a unique and perceptive history of British telecom infrastructure.The book has a tripartite structure.The first section, 'Plans' (Chapters 1 and 2), focuses on the Post Office's early conceptions of a new digital infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s.Ward examines how the Post Office developed visions for a nationalized digital infrastructure, particularly evaluating the power that cybernetics and information theory had on this process.He astutely highlights that the Post Office's digital visions and expectations for the future were complex and occasionally unsuccessful, detailing the failure of the Highgate Wood project, a mid-1950s attempt to build a computerized telephone exchange.Continuing the themes from the first chapter, Ward maintains his assessment of the Post Office's visions for the future by exploring the history the Long Range Systems Planning Unit, futurology, and the institutional response to the ever-changing political economy.The book's second part, 'Projects' (Chapters 3 and 4), illuminates the ways these visions came to fruition.Switching, an essential element of telecommunications, permits users to make phone calls, and Ward's third chapter narrates the shift to electronic switching in telephone exchanges, revealing how the Post Office and BT's monopolies not only impacted their services but also had far-reaching implications for the telephone exchange's employees and suppliers.Ward's bottom-up approach to this history explores how maintenance staff and telephone operators were forced to grapple with the ways in which digitalization and corporatization redefined their roles within these institutions or phased them out of employment entirely.This chapter also makes visible the gendered nature of this history and highlights the essential work carried out by women in telephone exchanges.Chapter 4 then shifts to a focus on BT's plans to develop a fibre-optic network, a form of transmission