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NEWSPAPERS: A NATIONAL ORINTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON?Joad RaymondPublished online: 20 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Joad Raymond (2012) NEWSPAPERS: A NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONALPHENOMENON?, Media History, 18:3-4, 249-257, DOI: 10.1080/13688804.2012.721647

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NEWSPAPERS: A NATIONAL OR

INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON?

Joad Raymond

The history of newspapers is traditionally written from a national perspective. Paradoxically,

however, the gathering and distribution of news undertaken by seventeenth century newspapers

was transnational. This article shows some of the methodological problems this paradox raises.

Through a case study of the weekly London newsbook Mercurius Politicus, it demonstrates the

nature and significance of international news in seventeenth century Britain. The history of the

early newspaper needs to be rewritten from the perspective of pan-European communication

networks.

KEYWORDS international news networks; European news; Mercurius Politicus;

seventeenth century Britain; community; historiography

In this article I seek to identify a paradox. It is a paradox that is central to the history

of early news media, by which I mean especially but not exclusively printed and

manuscript news serials. It is a fruitful paradox, one that is capable of suggesting and

guiding new developments in the history of media, and one that may ultimately cause us

to reconsider our own position*and conscious positioning*today.

The paradox can be expressed several ways. First: early serial news publications are

generally national. They are monoglot and, after the Latin Mercurius Gallobelgicus (1594),

written in vernaculars. They speak to national communities and national interests, to local

trade concerns. For commercial reasons (and in some cases ideological reasons) they

address as broad an audience as possible, and thus they employ an accessible vernacular

style. They bring readers together in a shared experience. It is because of this relationship

with communities of readers, because of their role in constructing virtual communities,

that newspapers have played such an important role in socio-historical conceptualisations

of nationhood*newspapers are given an instrumental role in the development of

national consciousness, nationalism and incipient capitalism in Benedict Anderson’s

influential thesis of the emergence of ‘Imagined Communities’. And attempts to explain

the influence of newspapers*such as Jurgen Habermas’ acclaimed and influential

account of the ‘public sphere’, the foundation of modern democracy*focus on their

relationship to the moral and political communities of a nation. Both Anderson and

Habermas have been influential in the field of media history. Newspapers�public opinion�democracy�nationhood: these are substantial and resonant associations. Yet there are

ways in which early newspapers were transnational: their news was sourced throughout

Europe, and they often received European distribution. So early newspapers are,

importantly, national phenomena; yet they are also transnational.

Another way of expressing this is to say that the history of newspapers is

traditionally written from the perspective of national history*the canvas is a national

one, and the methodology frequently tinged with nationalism*and yet the materials are

consistently international in nature. This fact is not overlooked in the history of early news

Media History, Vol. 18, Nos. 3�4, 2012ISSN 1368-8804 print/1469-9729 online/12/3�40249–09

# 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2012.721647

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media*far from it, as historians frequently emphasise the role of war in shaping the forms

of printed news*but the international exchanges are looked at from one side, and have a

guiding teleology rooted in the fortunes of a single nation. The larger picture in which

international news exchange is historiographically situated is guided by questions of

national politics and state formation; that is to say, it looks towards the present.

Assumptions about modernity and national identity shape the history of news so

profoundly that one can even say that what is defined as an early newspaper largely

depends on a political narrative and a set of assumptions about indigenous cultural

production. A national picture of an international phenomenon is bound to be partial,

even when judged by the most tolerant and flexible standards of objectivity.

There is no solution to this paradox. To write a history of the newspaper in a

traditional manner, but from an international perspective probably will not resolve the

problem: the history of news has become too rich*taking in sociological, political, book

historical and history of reading approaches*to cover so broad a topic without making

the narrative seem diaphanous. Simply expanding the horizons would leave the picture

unpersuasive from the perspective either of methodology or of evidence. Anthony Smith,

for one, wrote one of several international newspaper histories for the general reader, and

while it is very good in many respects, it perpetuates the kind of received opinions that

leads to a very linear, teleological, conceptually and culturally thin view of newspaper

history. It is one of the first books that modern journalists turn to when they want to put in

a few paragraphs about early newspapers*or pre-newspapers*in their sweeping

histories or memoirs. It presumably appeals in this way not only because it is readable,

but also on account of its whiggish underpinnings, and because it does not challenge

received wisdom. The kind of attention to detail that has characterised the best work on

early printed news*involving analysis of distribution, reading, patronage, printing history,

politics, economics, the interaction between speech, orality and print*could not be

expanded to a European stage on account of unfeasible scale.1

The national history of newspapers need not be automatically teleological, but the

enterprise of newspaper history has long been bound with pride and precedent-searching.

A sense of the historical significance of news media emerged in Britain in the late-

eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when the scrutinising and reinvention of the

past was interwoven with patriotism and a sense of national destiny. A pioneering history

of the newspaper in Britain written by George Chalmers in 1794 (as a digression in his The

Life of Thomas Ruddiman) expressed pride that the English had invented printed periodical

news with The English Mercurie in 1588: ‘we are told’, he wrote, ‘that posts gave rise to

weekly news-papers, which are likewise a French invention . . . the English Mercurie will

remain an incontestible proof of the existence of a printed news-paper in England, in an

epoch, when no other nation can boast a vehicle of news of a similar kind’. (Chalmers 108)

The claim held some currency, in Britain at least, and engendered some pride until it was

refuted in 1839 by Thomas Watts, a librarian at the British Museum, who demonstrated

that 1588 English Mercurie was a forgery from the 1740s. Philip Yorke, second Earl of

Hardwicke, had fabricated several issues in the 1740s, for unknown motives, and they had

found their way into the British Museum where Chalmers discovered them. But the very

minor scholarly wrangle surrounding these documents was a spur to the Victorian

Englishmen who proceeded to write the narrative histories of British newspapers*the

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growth of commercial news, the emergence of press freedom, the rise of the fourth

estate*that still influence more modern, culturally richer and more politically nuanced

histories of the media. So the history of newspapers, in Britain, began with a forgery, and

one immersed in patriotism, and for all of the bibliography that punched holes in it, the

outcome was more patriotism (Raymond ‘Introduction’ and ‘Review Article’).

Imagine the following scenario, which illustrates how international collaboration,

historical methodology, and patriotism can rub against each other. The German editor of a

German-based international encyclopaedia about the media draws up a plan with one

with a strong flavour of begriffsgeschichte in its methodology. This approach tends to

assign independent existence to concepts, and then looks for elements of them in

formation, regardless of whether those elements were performing an entirely different role

in that instantiation. It is popular in the German tradition, in contrast to the less systematic

language-based history of political thought now dominant in the Anglo-American

tradition. It is also a very useful way of organising an encyclopaedia, because it permits

conceptual neatness. The editor asks a contributor in the Anglo-American tradition to

write something under the heading ‘newspapers, forerunners of’. The invited contributor

has an oeuvre of publications on newspaper history that resist teleology, and she replies

that her approach is not to anticipate the present through the concept of a forerunner,

but to look at news publications in their original contexts, using concepts (if not words)

that were available to the people who produced and read them. That is a means of

limiting exposure to anachronism, and gives greater opportunity for understanding the

beliefs and actions of these people. A more sympathetic heading, for example, might be

‘newsbooks’ (the terms commonly used from the 1640s onwards), or ‘early newspapers’

(anachronistic but more neutral) or ‘news publications, C17th’.

The editor puzzles over this response, and wonders what is wrong with the word

‘forerunner’. He googles an online English�German dictionary, and enters the word

‘forerunner’. The result is ‘Vorlaufer’. He writes back that he cannot see the difficulty, that

he has looked at an online translation machine and finds that the ‘appropriate’ German

word for ‘forerunner’ is ‘Vorlaufer’, and that ‘Vorlaufer’ simply means ‘a phenotype that

carries already some of the features of the subject at hand’. Perhaps there is a better

English word? The potential contributor bristles: what have phenotypes to do with a

sensitive, materially-minded history? And what if she can prove that all of the characteristic

elements of the ideal type were present in some form or other in the sixteenth century?

Would that help us refine our sense of history? And would it ever be possible to persuade

those who hold onto ideal types that the facts of history complicate them because they do

not properly fit? While the ideal typical historians claim that those facts that do not fit the

model are evidence that the ideal had not yet been reached.

The problem is not, of course, the word ‘forerunners’ (or ‘phenotype’), but the

implied concept, and the assumption that history involves identifying the emergent

features of the present. Yet such international collaboration will be necessary to write an

international history, and there are profound obstacles not only in method, but also in the

practical methods that historians in different traditions use to collect and assess data, not

to speak of significant and underexplored asymmetries between the contents and the

cataloguing of the relevant archives in various countries.

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Just as language loses its poetry in Google Translate, when history is written

backwards it loses complexity and any regard for human motivation. In the specific case of

newspaper history, the teleological approach strips away the complex and untidy history

of innovation in those areas*such as periodicity, seriality, typographical consistency*that are usually held as central to the definition of the newspaper. It also strips away the

international-ness of those national histories. Interaction is abandoned in favour of a series

of dates and precedents (first weekly newspaper, first daily newspaper etc . . . the contours

of a concept emerging), some borrowed from overseas. The editor adds, in his email to the

potential contributor, that he was surprised that there was not more mention of the

German newspaper in her synopsis: after all, the newspaper originated in Strassburg in

1605.

Though the connection is not an essential one, there is an association between

teleology and nationalism in newspaper history. Conversely, newspaper history that

recognises the messiness of the way things actually are will be more inclined to

acknowledge the European dimension to national histories. The earliest newspaper was

demonstrably European. Its news spanned several European states, and it received pan-

European distribution. It was written in the language of trans-European communication:

Latin. Mercurius Gallobelgicus first appeared in 1594, initially in Cologne and subsequently

in Frankfurt, and it continued to appear until 1635. It appeared only twice a year, and it

was a substantial volume; it was, however, and importantly, both a serial and a periodical,

superseding a number of irregular news publications which had appeared across Europe,

in Paris, Poland, Venice, Vienna, Cologne and Hungary. The pan-European enterprise of

Mercurius Gallobelgicus was then followed by fissures, dispersal and fragmentation in the

culture of printed news. Weekly newspapers appeared over following decades: the first at

Strasbourg in 1605; another at Antwerp in the same year. Similar developments take place

in Basel from 1610, Paris in 1613, Frankfurt and Vienna by 1615, Hamburg and Berlin

shortly afterwards and then Amsterdam, London and Stockholm. The Gaceta de Madrid

appeared in 1661, initially annually, becoming weekly in 1667. A daily publication

appeared in Leipzig in 1650. As they spread and multiplied, newspapers became local and

vernacular. This is an international phenomenon.

Many individual histories have now been sketched, and some of the interactivity has

been explored*in work, for example, by Mario Infelise, Filipo di Vivo, Andre Belo, Jaume

Guillamet, Brendan Dooley, Paul Arblaster, Javier Dıaz Noci and Carmen Espejo. The rest of

this article sketches ways in which early British newspapers were international, in order to

indicate some of the methodological problems when we recognise this quality. To do so

also sheds light on some of the characteristic distinctiveness of the British newspaper trade.

For the very earliest news serials in Britain, the international traffic in news was

fundamental. Often credited with being the earliest English news periodicals*though

strictly speaking they were not periodicals*are the corantos of the 1620s and early 1630s.

These were initially printed in the Netherlands from 1618, then printed in English in the

Netherlands from 1620; subsequently (from 1622) they were printed in London (though

London-printed translations of non-serial publications began earlier, in 1618�1619). The

early English news-serials were mainly translations of Dutch news pamphlets (some of

which were sourced in turn in Germany and France). They contained only foreign news,

except when foreign news happened to be domestic news. One example of this was a

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1627 coranto that covered the Duke of Buckingham’s Ile de Re expedition, which was

significant in two respects: first, it involved sustained, albeit indirect, reporting of British

news; and secondly, it represented a conscious attempt to cultivate ‘popularity’ using the

press (Cogswell).

The prominence that these publications play in narratives of the development of

printed news may exaggerate if not their importance to readers, at least their place in the

developing communication machineries of early-modern Britain. It overlooks the existence

of earlier, non-serial printed items, also translated from Dutch corantos; and it overlooks

the fact that when weekly printed news publications appeared in 1641, which included

domestic news, they were printed directly from manuscript sources, entirely independent

of the corantos. The formative role assigned to corantos depends on a desire to fit them

into a more or less linear narrative of emergence. This originates in Victorian histories of

the newspapers, and their desire for narrative, because of an emphasis on print, and

because of the excellent bibliographies of English and Dutch corantos by the Dutch book-

historian Folke Dahl (Bibliography, and Dutch Corantos).

In other respects corantos are more interesting than is generally acknowledged.

Traditionally they are regarded as a step towards publications that incorporate domestic

news, itself a step towards the newspaper. Domestic news (rather than heterogeneous

news) is privileged over foreign news, not least because of the prevailing assumption that

it was domestic news that interested readers, who had to make do with foreign news

because of censorship restrictions. Hence the overarching narrative of the newspaper in

seventeenth century Britain proceeds thus: 1620s corantos; 1632 King Charles suppresses

them; 1641 collapse of censorship, explosion of news, first news serials with domestic

news; 1655 Cromwell takes control of press and his newspaper Mercurius Politicus

publishes only foreign news; 1658�1660 period of relative freedom; 1660�1678 Charles II

controls press through Roger L’Estrange meaning that the only domestic news is anodyne,

and the official newspapers Mercurius Politicus and then the London Gazette, focus

primarily on overseas news; 1678�1682 temporary lapse of Licensing Act results in more

competition; 1695 end of licensing results in market freedom. The domestic/foreign

dichotomy is essential to the staging posts of this narrative. So even though much of the

news is translated and about mainland Europe, the underlying assumption is that

governments practised a form of censorship and fed English readers foreign news as a

poor substitute for domestic news.

However, there are other, positive reasons for a powerful appetite for European

news in Britain. First is the interest in war. The first major shift towards publishing news in

Britain occurred between 1589, when Henry of Navarre was crowned King of France, and

about 1593, when he re-converted to Catholicism; during these years London publishers

issued numerous pamphlets translated from French occasionnels. The second major shift

began around 1618, with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (it was this that led to the

corantos). The first newsbooks including extensive British news (importantly, news of

parliament), appeared in 1641 at the centre of the conflict that would within a year result

in the outbreak of civil war.

Secondly, out of religious concerns. Religious identity extended over national

boundaries, and a sense of pan-European confessional fraternity intensified during periods

of inter-confessional conflict. The size of Protestant Europe was shrinking in the

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early-seventeenth century, and European news was read with trepidation and unease. The

puritan Nehemiah Wallington was a compulsive book buyer and an obsessive reader and

talker of news. His notebooks from the 1620s through the 1650s record his pursuit of

news, but also his responses to it, including his sympathy for co-religionists caught up in

the Thirty Years’ War, and strong sense of Providence. Providence was integral to how

early-modern Protestants wrote and read the news, and the fortunes of Protestants over

Europe were linked. When a Protestant army triumphed it was seen as evidence of divine

will. David Randall argues that this view does not extend, among writers of news at least,

to battles where Catholics triumphed. Wallington, however, suggests that the news, if not

written to express such a view, at least was interpreted that way. In 1654 he wrote in one

of his notebooks:

I doe see that God is now as righteous and as iust a God as euer and therefore that God

will being some heauy Iudgement or desolation vpon England if there (be not spedy)

Repentance for what Sinne is wanting in any Land of Nation that God hath destroyed

that doth not abound in this Land the old world Sodom & Gomora Ierusalem where is

Bohemia and Pelatinate O the miserys of Germina and Ierland and what sine was in they

yt is not with vs . . .2

Wallington believed that the fate of England was not distinguishable from that of the

other Protestant states in Europe, that news and providence did not stop at the channel. In

this respect, British readers of newsbooks, even those not from the elite, educated classes,

were cosmopolitan. They were actively interested in news from overseas. While this

characteristic of early newspaper history has been attributed to state intervention, it was

also an effect of the book trade operating under commercial conditions and accom-

modating powerful social norms and mores.

There are other ways in which British news publications were not restricted by

political and linguistic boundaries. This can be seen in the case of Mercurius Politicus,

perhaps the most interesting individual newspaper in early-modern Britain. Published

between 1650 and 1660, it reported on an eventful decade that saw experiments with

several forms of republican government and experiments with press control. Its editor

Marchamont Nedham, a pioneer of news writing in Britain, was appointed to generate

support for the new regime by the Council of State, which formed one of the two arms of

government. His office was at Whitehall, his immediate overseer initially Walter Frost,

followed by John Thurloe. Through his position he had access to official government

papers, as well as his own extensive list of correspondents. Thurloe provided Nedham with

privileged access to both official and secret documents. He thereby had access to the

reports of the commonwealth’s spy network. It is doubtful that any newswriter before him,

even Theophraste Renaudot, had so a rich a supply of intelligence.3

The arrangement also meant that the government could keep a close eye on

Nedham’s work. Mercurius Politicus was an official state publication and Nedham salaried

for his efforts. Notwithstanding this, Politicus did not receive a state subsidy, and turned a

significant commercial profit. Payments made by Nedham to the spymaster Thurloe were

either for intelligence services (as part of an internal market) or a share of the journal’s

profits. The ambassador Sir Samuel Morland was awarded a share of its profits. Morland

(who was very diligent at claiming back expenses from the government, including

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charitable donations to the poor) would later complain that he had not received his

allotted share. Politicus was, in both senses of the word, a popular journal, and there is

more direct evidence for readers and reading*in correspondence and other specific

evidence*of this than of any other British news publication in the period. Politicus,

therefore, made available to a wide readership*possibly a local popular readership and a

more worldly and educated international readership*the news-gathering resources of

the British state; it provided them with a means of conceiving a pan-European world view

(Raymond ‘Rostro Europeo’, ‘Mercury’).

It is worth underscoring the fact that Politicus was profitable, and did not require a

state subsidy as part of its monopoly. In the context of an account of the recent demise of

true investigative reporting, which suggests that formerly newspapers had implicitly

understood that profits would be used to fund such long-term assignments, Alex Jones’

recent Losing the News uses commercial independence as the dividing line between

modern and pre-modern newspapers. For Jones, pre-nineteenth century newspapers were

subsidised, and it was only the commercial newspapers that fostered independence and

social responsibility. It is, he argues, the modern preoccupation with profit, combined with

the unreliability of the new media, that threatens the role of investigative reporting, which

holds governments and public officers accountable. Yet Politicus was not subsidised,

though it was for some years protected; it was commercially viable, and nonetheless

involved in positive spin for the government; and, importantly, its news was rich and wide-

ranging. For all of the bribes and backhanders that were exchanged, as Jason Peacey has

argued (Politicans, ‘Cromwellian England’), in seventeenth century news and pamphlet

culture, the qualified commercial independence and viability of the news press was

essential to its relatively free development.

Examining the documents that passed through Thurloes’s office, comparing them

with the printed content of Politicus, and looking at other correspondence about news in

early-modern Europe illuminates the role of Politicus in gathering and disseminating news.

Thurloe’s overseas correspondents frequently favourably compare Politicus to the local news

media, and they ask for extra copies so they can disseminate them locally. Some suggest the

local value (to them, as ambassadors or envoys or more generally to local opinion) of positive

publicity in Politicus. Others ask Thurloe to persuade Nedham to tone down his

antimonarchical rhetoric. Many supply Thurloe with news and intelligence, and sometimes

write that they have no news other than what has been already published in Politicus.

These various documents reveal an extensive network of multi-way trade between

Maestricht, Breda, The Hague, Amsterdam, Paris and London; correspondents sent Politicus

and Dutch newsbooks back and forth. Royalists in Holland read both English and Dutch

diurnals and pamphlets, and reported back on what they had read. These communications

were not always direct: centres of news were often triangulated in this way, relaying news

between other nodes. We find similar geographical dynamics of news-gathering and

-distribution in Italy and Germany, between Livorno, Rome, Cologne, Vienna and

Hamburg. Where there is little evidence of dynamic interchange of news is with Spain;

it is probable that such news arrived and was sent filtered via a more confessionally-

sympathetic entrepot. Such networks merit future research: they are probably the most

pressing and promising issue in the history of early media today (Dooley, Dooley and

Baron). Aspects of printed news that are viewed as the consequence of local factors, such

NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL? 255

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as demand, mores, legislation and government policy, may in fact be the consequence of a

particular news centre occupying a particular place at the end of an extensive, pan-

European network.

Thurloes’s mailbag suggests intensive transactions and translation. In these

exchanges Politicus participated from both ends. Politicus reached an international

readership, both British and non-British. These overseas readers compared Politicus

critically with other sources, oral, epistolary and local printed news. They returned news by

post, news that reflected and developed their engagement as readers, and as participants

in politics in other European news networks and political centres. They imported and

exported news and newspapers. This international impact*perhaps international life*of

Politicus, available to all its readers, elite and popular, shows that the British newspaper

was not a local phenomenon. Though following a popular format and though written in

English, Politicus crossed linguistic and national boundaries. It used the vernacular in an

era when Britain’s second language was Latin, the language of pan-European commu-

nication, and Latin may have served as a conduit between one vernacular and another,

while Politicus offered exposure to English to a Latin-reading audience (further research on

communities of translators, their practices and networks, and their relationship with

publishers, is essential4). Any account of the British newspaper in the early-modern period

as a local phenomenon is insufficient.

The perspective in this article has been exclusively on production on one side of La

Manche, and news gathering and reception on other. But a paradox nonetheless emerges

from this account*of a vernacular form and a nationalist historiography versus a trans-

and inter-national life*and it needs unravelling. And to do this we need to go much

further than the archipelagic perspective that currently informs early-modern history and

criticism, into a detailed, empirical study of the news communication networks that

extended from Messina to Uppsala, from Lisbon to Warsaw and beyond.5

Notes

1. However, Andrew Pettegree is currently engaged on a single volume history of the news in

early-modern Europe.

2. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, p. 423 (2 November 1654). In a modern edition:

Booy 332�3.

3. Thurloe’s State Papers appear in Bodleian MSS Rawl. A. 66�59, and scattered elsewhere.

There is also a selective edition: Birch. On Thurloe and his office see also: Aubrey; Pincus 58

and passim; Peacey ‘Cromwellian’.

4. See ‘Renaissance Cultural Crossroads’ Bhttp://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rcc/�.

5. These are issues explored by the Leverhulme-funded collaborative project News Networks in

Early-Modern Europe. See Bhttp://earlymodernnewsnetworks.wordpress.com/�.

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