How did 19th century increases in the speed of information effect global economic integration, and what were the local effects of increasing global ties? Others describe how steam technology changed the pace and volume of trade, but, faster than steamship lines or rail lines, telegraph lines spread and connected seemingly remote areas to global networks of information and capital. This paper examines the effects of the telegraph in the Ottoman Empire during the Long Depression of 1873-79. Focusing on famine-stricken Ottoman Anatolia and Iraq in the 1870s, it demonstrates how faster movements of information and credit exacerbated famine conditions and stoked sectarian tensions. By 1865, the Ottoman telegraph network connected the empire’s Asian possessions from Istanbul to Basra. During the military and financial crises that engulfed the Ottomans in the 1870s and 1880s, this network allowed authorities to communicate with and extract taxes from far-flung provinces. When famine struck the Ottoman East in 1879-81, telegraphs also allowed humanitarians to rapidly fund aid activities in the region. During the famine, Armenians and their neighbors benefited greatly from hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid collected by the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate. Kurdish tribes in the region, lacking such global ties, were left to rely on a debt-ridden Ottoman state. Tropes about heartless Christians leaving Kurds to suffer began appearing in the Ottoman press, demonstrating how soaring food prices and rapid capital movements created opportunities to stoke ethno-confessional tensions. By examining the social and economic ramifications of telegraphy in the Ottoman East, this paper goes beyond studies that treat material life and discourse as separate objects of study. Instead, it demonstrates inextricable links between these two allegedly separate spheres, showing how rapid information movements exacerbated deteriorating material conditions and, in turn, how material conditions transformed sectarian politics.