Abstract
Was the 1984 privatisation of British Telecom (BT) the pre-eminent event in the history of digitalisation? It kickstarted digital communications and heralded the large-scale privatisation of state-owned utilities and infrastructure in Europe, and later large parts of the world; two processes that are so interlinked that they feed off each other, changing political economies and unleashing the transformative power of liberalised capitalism in turn. Or so the story goes, with the established narrative coherent and strong enough to subsume all the potential paths not taken.