ten books that shaped the british empire edited by burton and hofmeyr

8/10/2019 Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire edited by Burton and Hofmeyr

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Ten Books

T H AT S H A P E D T H E

British.

Creating an Imperial Commons

A N T O I N E T T E B U R TO N

A N D

I S A B E L H O F M E Y R ,

E D I T O R S

Duke University Press.Durham and London.2014


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2014 Duke University PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States o America on acid-ree paperext designed by Courtney Leigh Bakerypeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dataen books that shaped the British Empire : creating an imperial commons /

Antoinette Burton and Isabel Homeyr, editors.pages cmIncludes bibliographical reerences and index. 978-0-8223-5813-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5827-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. BooksGreat BritainHistory. 2. ImperialismHistoriography.3. Great BritainColoniesHistoriography. . Burton, Antoinette M., 1961. Homeyr, Isabel.16.45 2014909.09'71241dc23

Cover art: Collage based on vintage endpaper o red grosgrain silk. SpencerCollection, Te New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and ilden Foundations.


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.ix

. Te Spine o Empire?

Books and the Making o an Imperial Commons .1

1

Remaking the Empire rom Newgate:

WakeeldsA Letter rom Sydney.29

2

Jane Eyreat Home and Abroad .50

3

Macaulays History o England:

A Book Tat Shaped Nation and Empire .71

C O N T E N T S


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viContents

4

Te Day Will Come:

Charles H. PearsonsNational Lie and

Character: A Forecast.90

5

Victims o British Justice?

A Century o Wrong as Anti-imperial ract,

Core Narrative o the Arikaner Nation, and

Victim-Based Solidarity-Building Discourse .112

6

Te ext in the World, the World through the ext:

Robert Baden-PowellsScouting or Boys.131

7

Hind Swaraj:

ranslating Sovereignty .153


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Contents vii

8

otaram Sanadhyas Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh:

A History o Empire and Nation in a Minor Key .168

9

C. L. R. Jamess Te Black Jacobinsand

the Making o the Modern Atlantic World .190

10

Ethnography and Cultural Innovation

in Mau Mau Detention Camps:

Gakaara wa WanjausMhrga ya Agky.216

.

.239

.261 .265


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We would like to acknowledge the National Research Foundation and the

Faculty o Humanities, University o the Witwatersrand, which providedunding that enabled a meeting o the contributors in Johannesburg. Ourthanks as well to Merle Govind or her sterling administrative support, andto Miriam Angress or her skill and care in shepherding the manuscriptthrough the many highways and byways o the process.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S


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Like the history o modern paperwork more generally, the career o theEnglish-language book in the age o empire is ull o surprises.Te em-

bodiment o English manly authority, the book was not simply a surrogateEnglishman in his highest and most perect state, it was the very emblemo imperial sovereigntywith the rigorous spine a testimony to its singu-larity, its probity, its titular power. Discussions o the colonial archive high-light the monumentality o imperial volumesblue books, surveys, cen-

suses, commissions, dictionariesthat embodied the apparent solidity oimperial rule.Te King James Bible is perhaps the best example o a bookconscripted into an imperial role: a tome conerring the philanthropicgif o Christianity and civilization, it was imagined in some evangelicalaccounts to be capable o traveling by itsel through different landscapeso palm and pine and creating a unied Christian empire in its wake. Nor was the books power contained merely within its covers. As studieso individual authors like Walter Scott and John Bunyan have shown, the

characters and titles rom their texts were memorialized across empire inthe names o suburbs, streets, ships, and people.Like the wide variety ogoods and commodities that made their way through the circuitry o global

I N T R O D U C T I O N. T H E S P I N E O F E M P I R E ?

Books and the Making o an Imperial Commons

A N T O I N E T T E B U R T O N A N D

I S A B E L H O F M E Y R


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market capitalism, books impressed themselves in the everyday lives o im-perial subjects, maniesting the ormal values o an elite or bourgeois seland modeling in their material orm the coherence and commanding pres-ence o British imperial power itsel.

Yet or all their pretensions to coherence and stability, books in theage o empire were both less and more than they appeared to be. As thetitles we have gathered here illustrate, the book was not always a preabri-cated thing, ready-made and unied along a neat vertical axis. More ofenthan not, what arrived between covers was the consequence o a varietyo imperial trajectories: upcyclings rom pamphlet material or recyclingsrom scissor-and-paste newspaper clippingsragments remixed, in turn,through the geographically disaggregated networks that constituted the

British Empire in its modernizing orms. In this sense, the book as weimagine it may be said to be part o a global paper empire.We seekhere to push that concept in two directions: rst, towardthe book as a ma-terial orm and a geopolitical inuencea carrier o imperial opinion andauthority and a provocation to imperial power as welland second, awayrom the book as distinct rom or superior to the varieties o imperial printcultures-in-common through which it circulated. Tough this seems para-doxical, even contradictory, in act it is indispensable to any study o booksand empire that reuses to etishize either object o inquiry. It is our col-lective contention that their entwined histories require otherwise. For thehistory o books and their imperial careers that contributors to this volumehave built allows us to see with particular vividness how and why changes inand challenges to empire were always dispersed events, not dependent onsingular, bounded origins or orms but produced by multiple singularitiesthat congealed in and against specic historical circumstances.I empire

was not a coherent whole but an assemblagea ar-ung, reticulate, andvascular patchwork o spaces joined by mobile subjects o all kindsthebook itsel was ofen also just such an assemblage. Indeed, the very categoryo the book is potentially a red herring. Te presumptive spine that uni-ed empire and xed dissent, the book turns out to be a radical sign o thechaotic pluralism o imperial authority and legitimacy, and in the case othis book, times ten.

Like all books, this book has a multiaceted genealogy. It started as a col-

laboration between a historian o imperialism and a scholar o transnationalbook history interested in thinking about how books shaped the modernBritish Empire, both through the ideas they articulated and the material


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Introduction 3

orms those ideas took. In our quest or a commanding title ourselves, wexed on the notion o ten books that changed the British Empirenotthe ten most signicant books, but a diverse set o titles whose inuenceon imperial discourse and power we could trace through the careers o the

texts themselves. o our surprise, among the ten we chose, ve had begunas pamphlets and one as a newspaper serialembryonic book orms that

became consolidated between permanent, ormal covers as a result o theirmovement through various circuits o empire. We began to realize that

books themselves were not necessarily as sel-evident as we rst thought:while some started with the purposeul spine their authors intended,others grew rom the tumultuous realm o the periodical, the pamphlet, themaniesto, the broadsheet, the newsletter into something else altogether:

the canonicaland as Homeyr has written elsewhere, the monumentalbook orm.Te inuence o these books was both direct and indirect, de-pending on their orm: depending, in other words, on their specic histori-cal iterations in and through the imperial commons they helped to create.aken together, the ten books in this collection reveal the workings o animperial print culture-in-the-making that enabled such unlooked-or trans-ormations: a species o mobile imperial commons that took various mate-rial orms, o which the book is surprisingly just one.

As surprising to us, in all the various conversations we had about thisvolume, none o our interlocutors questioned its basic premise: that bookscould change empire. People seemed quite ready and willing to envisagea series o big books that ounded empires (Macaulay, Seeley, Dilke,Lugard) and a set o equally signicant books that ended up dismantlingthem (Fanon, Cabral, Guevara). Tese authors and their books certainlymark out a historically amiliar path rom empire to nation. Yet despite our

interest in the question o transormation, this collection resists a strictlydevelopmentalist model o historical inuence or change. Instead weveocused on how books in the age o empire imagined how imperialism

worked, assessed how or why it didnt, and diagnosed what its successesand ailures meant or the ate o global hegemony at a variety o historical

junctures. So we revisit imperial classics, big books automatically associatedwith the British Empire dominant, i not ascendant: Charlotte BrontsJaneEyre(1847), Macaulays History o England(1848 and ollowing), Charles

Pearsons National Lie and Character(1893) and Robert Baden-PowellsScouting or Boys(1908). We explore anticolonial blockbusters, texts thatrocked the oundations o imperial authority, rom their initial appearance


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(C. L. R. Jamess work Te Black Jacobins, 1938), or long aferward (Mohan-das K. Gandhis Hind Swaraj, 1909). And we look to texts that may be less wellknown, i at all, to students o empire: Edward Gibbon Wakeelds workALetter rom Sydney(1827), the jointly authored Century o Wrong(1899), o-

taram Sanadhyas 1914 work Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh(My wenty-OneYears in Fiji), and Gakaara wa Wanjaus 1960 workMhrga ya Agky(TeClans o the Gikuyu). We do so not by way o bringing these works intosome kind o literary canon, postcolonial or otherwise. We see them more asthe portable property o an ever-evolving imperial commons: not the kindthat moves rom space to space unchanged but, more precisely, the kind

whose mobility reshapes the very orm and content o the book itsel.

Tough we remain attached to our ten books as vehicles or this argu-

ment, we ocus more purposeully here on the meanings o imperial com-mons as a site o deterritorialized sovereignty in the textual economy o themodern British Empire. Our use o the phrase imperial commons derivesrom an old term that has recently gained a new lie in relation to digitalcommunications (or dot.commons, as one writer styles it). A commonsis normally understood as a resource in joint use or possession; . . . heldor enjoyed equally by a number o persons. Te right to the resource isnot contingent on obtaining the permission o anyone: No one exercises aproperty right with respect to these resources.o put the terms rights,enjoy, and joint use alongside the term imperial may seem shocking,since empire represents the very oppositedenial o rights, exclusive ac-cess or racialized elites, enclosure and dispossession.

Yet, when applied to textual resources, the term makes considerable sense.Most printed matter in empire unctioned without reerence to copyright:

American reprints, Protestant evangelical publications, offi cial publications,

or the extensive network o periodicals that carpeted empire and generatedmost o their copy rom each other, with or without ormal exchange agree-ments.Indeed this situation was in part abetted by imperial copyright leg-islation that protected the rights only o European metropolitan-based pro-ducers selling in the colonial market, although colony-specic regulationsdid attempt to ll the gap.Te tangle o national, colonial, imperial, and in-ternational intellectual property law created an uneven terrain.Tose agen-cies invested in copyright, such as large British publishing companies and

their associated agencies, customs offi cials, or colonial states, had limitedsuccess enorcing these rights. Tis conusion created opportunities wherecolonized elites could strategically deploy or ignore copyright. As Karin


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Introduction 5

Barber has argued, elite Yoruba writers did at times make use o copyrightlegislation, generally in relation to books rather than newspapers. Yetsuch attempts to seek copyright protection were limited, especially in exist-ing intellectual systems and media (whether manuscript, perormative, or

oral) where the notion that words could be converted into private propertymade no sense.

Te periodical exchange system was especially important in creating amobile imperial commons. Initially a pretelegraph phenomenon, the sys-tem persisted among those who could not afford the steep wire service eesand/or objected to their imperial bias. Tese interwoven periodicals pro-duce the textual ormat so amiliar to anyone who has worked with imperialnewspapers. Any one page will largely be composed o cuttings rom else-

where, each page convening its own miniature empire as snippets rom theCalcutta Herald, the Rangoon imes, the Johannesburg Star, the ManchesterGuardian, and the Sydney Heraldrub shoulders. Te juxtaposition o thesepieces invited readers to construct their own empire without copyright.Such orms o reading depended on comparison and circulation, with read-ers juxtaposing different colonies or different imperial systems via a ormatthat announced that it had come rom a periodical elsewhere and was morethan likely destined or another. Tis periodical ormat and its mode oreading constituted a widespread and homemade global idiom and needsto be understood as a demotic orm o world literature. Tis descriptionaccords well with Emily Apters argument or a lowercase world literature,one o whose characteristics (alongside untranslatability, the burden o hermonograph) might be a dispossessive ethics o reading that challenges thepresumptive sel-interest and sel-having assumed to condition the readersrelation to cultural property. Tis dispossessive stance casts World Liter-

ature as an unownable estate, a literature over which no one exerts pro-prietary prerogative and which lends itsel to a critical turn that puts theproblem o property possession ront and centre.Tis twentieth-centuryrubric had underpinnings that were, indubitably, a global imperial com-mons: not simply a shared imperial space but a densely populated domain

with a miniature empire convened on virtually every page.

As with all commons, access would have been uneven and dependenton wealth, location, levels o literacy. Censorship and colonial state in-

tervention would have constituted another hindrance. Yet, despite theseactors, the principle remained that very ew property rights existed with re-spect to these resources. Tey were textual resources over which one could


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exercise a common right. Te implications o such an imperial commons arewide-ranging and call minimally or histories o copyright and intellectualproperty across empire that work rom the textual practice up rather thanthe law down.Tis collection deploys the idea o the imperial commons

to grapple with ideas o both book and empire, an intersection that requiresus to provincialize the book, the better to grasp its power.

Charismatic Books, Mobile Imperial Histories

Our ten books came in different shapes and sizes, rom the slender tractto the multivolume tome. Some were artisanally crafed pamphlets; somestarted in periodicals or as ephemera, only to rise up into bookness beore

sinking back again. Working through the capillaries o imperial print cultureand colonial politics, these charismatic texts speak broadly to the history othe book and its empire-building capacities rom the start o the nineteenthcentury to decolonization and beyond. Elleke Boehmers discussion oBaden-Powells Scouting or Boys, or example, shows how its ideas o riend-ship, imagined initially in a racialized vein, were taken up across empire and

beyond and turned into a model o international exchange and comrade-ship that echoed Rabindranath agores amously cosmopolitan versionso Indian nationalism. Mrinalini Sinha, in contrast, considers a humble

book, namely a Hindi pamphlet (Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh) written by anindentured laborer returned rom the plantations o Fiji. In its content, the

booklet gave expression to a growing desire in India to put an end to the in-denture system that humiliated our countrymen overseas, as the parlanceo the day put it. Having worked in South Arica, Gandhi understood thesesentiments and was quick to capitalize on the anti-indenture movement or

his own mobilization. An anti-imperial text like the multiauthored workACentury o Wrong, the hasty maniesto that set out the Boer cause on theeve o the Anglo-Boer war (South Arican war), also worked in unexpected

ways. As Andr du oit explains, the tract ared briey, courtesy o the pro-Boer international solidarity movements, but then disappeared, its longerterm effects only maniest via the slow violence o Arikaner nationalismand apartheid more than hal a century on and beyond, nding echoes inlate twentieth-century discussions o nationalism. What came up and off

the printed page in the age o empire not only traveled ar, in other words;it illuminates, or us, a variety o pathways between texts and power ratherthan a singular, evolutionary, quantiable or predictable one.


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Introduction 7

I each o our ten books tells a story, it does not do so just because it waspublished or made its way into readers hands (or heads or hearts). Tereare deep histories o composition, circulation, suppression, and even disap-pearance that these essays track, shedding light on imperial processes not

otherwise visible via either a pure history-o-ideas approach or a bottom-up social history approach. Appreciating the materiality o the book, itsmobility and its storied career, is critical or the communicativehistory oempire it has the capacity to tell. Te emphasis on the book as one partic-ular, i not peculiar, embodiment o an imperial inormation system is cru-cial or challenging the methodological etishism o the object itsel; soas not to reiy it, in other words, but to reinsert it into the series o imperialcommodity chains and virtual public spheres whence it came and which it

indubitably shaped.And yet the book is hard to put down or set aside, especially in the age

o the e-reader and the tail end o anglo-global empire in which we live. Sowhile our texts are diverse, our method or thinking through the bywaysand the zones o encounter they sponsored is, quite simply, the book itsel:an object and a category that this collection aims to right-size in the con-text o the imperial commons through which it exercised its power. Books,

we argue, need to be placed against the sprawling media ecologies oempire that take shape as different circuits and systems o textual transmis-sion intersectedmanuscript, codex, oral genres, writing systems, print.

As ony Ballantyne reminds us in his account o Wakeelds Letter romSydney, the public spheres o empire depended on avalanches o circulat-ing words, whether lithographed, cyclostyled, scribbled, whispered, sung,declaimed rom the hustings, printed in tomes, enacted on stage, or readaloud. By paying attention to these maniold material orms o the word,

we can better grasp the big and small ways in which texts act as orces in animperial world. For all that modern British imperial culture etishized the

book ormthat surrogate Englishmanin the end it was an imperialcommodity, subject to the laws o political economy and the vagaries o theglobal market, which ung it into ofen improbable hands with equally im-probable consequences, some o which we can determine, some o whichare not recuperable even through the kinds o materialist histories we aimor here.

Against all odds, there are some things we can know about the recep-tion o some books.We know that the joys and sorrows o transnationalintimacies that an imperial book in transit could conjure were elt rsthand


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Introduction 9

into an educational system where it was read by thousands o Kenyanschoolchildren, who likely absorbed its moral lessons but scarcely noticedits author. A decidedly downwardly mobile book, it did its transormative

work out o sight, in the wake o the violence o empire, in the pedagogical

recesses o the newly postcolonial state.In thinking about books not just as mobile objects but as themselves

dispersed events, this introduction draws on the work o Carol Gluck andAnna sing. Teir collection, Words in Motion, treats discrete words (secu-larism in Morocco, responsibility in Japan, custom in Southeast Asia, mi-nority in Egypt) the way we treat our ten books: as intellectual and politicalcongurations shaped by their movement in time and space even as theyshape the historical conditions in which they operate, whether by affi rma-

tion o the status quo or dissent rom it. What Gluck and sing have saidabout the dozen or so words they have nominated or study, we might sayabout the books we examine here. I power pushed some words around,they write, others moved by virtue o their own magnetism. Or: One

way to pay attention to both the cosmopolitan and the regional specicityo words in motion is to consider their materiality . . . [and] the materi-ality o communication.As Michael Warner has suggested, this entailsthe recognition that books, like words, are not ctitious, or even simplymaterial, objects. Tey are themselves material agents: path-makers orthe circulation o ideas and discourses and, as such, makers o history inthe bargain. Like Gluck and sings words, we argue that books must betreated as social entities that, in our case, help to bring imperial publicsand their critics into being.

As useully or our purposes, Gluck and sing argue that words show usstruggles over which scales . . . matter. Books in the age o the British im-

perialism unction analogously here.

Tey contained the world o empireby shrinking it between covers, making it highly portable and even propri-etary, as those who purchasedJane Eyreor owned Scouting or Boysmighthave elt. Books could also scale empire up to epic proportions, as Macau-lays monumental History andor young men and women, at leastBaden-Powells small but sturdy manual were wont to do. Books could also

bring empire abruptly to ground, as Te Black Jacobinsdid, or sow seeds oanxiety and doubt, as was the case with Pearson. Not incidentally, we are as

interested in the plasticity o the book orm, the bookish-ness o its becom-ing, as in the books themselves. In emphasizing its antecedent ormstheorigins o Wakeelds Letter rom Sydney as a prison scribbling or the


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beginnings o Hind Swaraj in the columns o a Durban newspaperweresist the pull o the book as the incarnation o empire, preerring to ndimperial power on offense or deense in the ts and starts o its multipleembodiments. We resist, too, a rankly vain search or literal connection

(X read Y and then did Z). In these essays, the book orm reveals the cha-otically plural worlds o empire, where vertical grids certainly operated but

where connections were as typically horizontal: a crazy patchwork thatcrosscut core and periphery and radiated inuence rather than modelingan event chain o inuence or consequence.

Tis approach suggests itsel in part because the books under consider-ation here were sites o deterritorialized subjectivity. Tough produced inthe context o empire, they were a reuge or those who did not necessarily

think in conventionally imperialist or even nationalist idioms. As such, theywere also a mechanism or deterritorialized sovereignty: a moving objectthat opened up spaces inside and outside the two coversspaces that, inturn, allowed or questions about the character o imperial rule, the natureo good government, the urgency o resistance, the injustice o imperialnarratives, the right and proper conditions o colonization and settlement.Tough downwardly mobile and recessively inuential, Gakaaras bookletencases a key question or the ten books we have brought together here:Why am I t to rule? In his case, the question was endemic to the end oempire: as Peterson notes, Aricas patriots sought to surpass their colonialrulers, to project an image o integrity and responsibility that testied totheir tness to govern themselves. Despite their particularities, the bookseatured here can be read as both raising and answering this question. Teyexplore diverse ideals o sovereignty, o who should and should not rule,

what rule should or should not bea project that involved imagining the

limits o empire, even and especially when the authors intention was totout its providentiality or its endless uturity. Tat most writers stroveto express these ideas in books (or the closest they could get to that orm)is not an accident, since books themselves were a orm o and claim onsovereignty in an imperial context.

Books and Sovereignty: Te Single Volume and the Chaos o Empire

In the highbrow worlds o modern national-imperial culture, the Englishbook betokens autonomy, authority, and sovereignty. It can exempliy anidea like nation and empire, making these monuments and exemplars o


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Introduction 11

English virtue, civility, and nation-ness. Macaulays book is a model inevery sense: it tells the biography o a model nation, it models good gover-nance and nationhood, its portability models mobile Englishness, and asan object it stands as a miniature model o England itsel. Te Historyen-

compasses the scale o empire not only by the vast imperial spaces it mapsbetween covers but by the distance it traveled as well. In a particularly per-ormative instance o this kind o textual entwinement, an advertisementor Coles Book Arcade in Melbourne in the Australian media in the 1910sshowed a sea serpent stretching rom England to Australia carrying packetso books on the curves o its back.

Small wonder that those with anticolonial ambitions requently ex-pressed themselves in similarly monumental volumes designed to stand

as the counter-current to empires master narrative and to circulate amongthose who wished to curtail its persuasive power. NehrusDiscovery o India(1946) and oward Freedom(1941) are suitably epic in both content andorm. When C. L. R. James produced Te Black Jacobinsin 1938, it appearedin a handsome 328-page edition rom Secker and Warburg. Te back othe dust cover eatured a series o companion volumes all in epic vein (ex-amples include Te ragedy o the Chinese Revolution; Green Banners: TeStory o the Irish Struggle; and Stalin). While not motivated by any straight-orward anti-imperialism, Gakaara wa Wanjau aspired to have all his workpublished in one large volume, an ambition he never realized due to theexpense. oday syllabi o postcolonial literature still show a bias towardthe book in the orm o the novel. More popular orms like the magazineor periodical tend to be studied in courses on popular culture. Like the bil-dungsroman, the book constitutes a proxy or autonomous selood.

Peter Stallybrass has traced out the long conessional history o the ide-

ology o the single volume, that avatar o universal knowledge that servedas the legitimating basis o an immodestly evangelizing imperial mission.In Christian pictorial traditions going back to the late Middle Ages, the ourevangelists write their gospels in bound volumes rather than loose sheetso parchment, which would have been the extant medieval practice. Whatthey inscribe is already gathered together, consolidated, and error ree. Te

bound volume exuded permanence: it was designed to last and could standon a shel (when modern bookshelves nally took shape). Te pamphlet

by contrast was dog-eared, could not stand on its own, and apparentlyexpressed ideas that were provisional and still in ormation. In a moresecular vein, Leah Price has thrown light on the affective power o the


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single volume.Her route into this theme starts in the present. How is it,she asks, that our methods or studying books are so divided: literary stud-ies or the inside and book history or the outside? Why is it so diffi cult tostudy the book as an integrated object? Her answer takes us back to Victo-

rian Britain and its particular ideology o the bound volume. As she dem-onstrates, the novel becomes a singularly popular orm: brought reely as acommodity and read pleasurably rom beginning to end. Te style o read-ing it entails is important: readers become possessed by the text, orgetting

both themselves and the physical book that they hold.As her ingenious interpretation o the Victorian novel itsel demon-

strates, these modes o reading sort good characters rom bad (a themeCharlotte Macdonald takes up in her discussion o Jane Eyre). Virtuous

characters are recognizable by the way they read, namely in an attentiveand disembodied way. Feckless characters read only tully or use booksas weapons to harm others, or demonstrate their superciality by caringor books only as objects o interior decoration. As Price indicates urther,the affective hold o the novel is reinorced by its implicit contrast with thetract. Te ormer is actively chosen by a consumer and is read with plea-sure. Te latter is given away as an object o charity and involves reading asduty. Te tract transaction underlines the relative social status o giver andreceivermistress and servant; doctor and patient; Christian missionaryand heathen; colonizer and colonized; husband and wie. As Price alsomakes clear, the glamour o the novel depends on the dowdiness o thetract. Stallybrass likewise calls or the printed book to be parochialized inrelation to other print orms.Bound books only ever constituted a smallpercentage o what was printed: orms, labels, handbills, letterheads, book-lets, leaets, tracts, chapbooks, newspapers made up the bulk o a printers

business. Yet, however much they may tower above these nether regions oprint, hardcover volumes still accrue meaning in relation to them.

For those invested in the monumentality o the hardback volume, theprinted book loomed above this landscape (especially in settings wherehardback books were relatively rare and expensive). Yet, when we place it

back in its habitat, we see that the book was not a sel-starter but arose outo and sank back into these other orms. Books are rehearsed in newspa-pers, periodicals pamphlets, letters, and plays. Tey travel through reviews,

polemical argument, and public debate. Tey channel and plagiarize eachother. Te book is always already a dispersed and a dispersingevent: printsprawled across distance, time, language, and script, carving out pathways


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Introduction 13

o interest and inuence, creating and re-creating imperial events and, inthe process, shaping an imperial commons that presumed shared values

but also sponsored debate, doubt, critique. Tese collusions and collisionsproduced distinctive textual ormations across empire that scholars are just

beginning to investigate in qualitative and quantitative terms.Meanwhile,it seems highly probable, i not likely, that the book, imagined as a text be-tween covers, constitutes a smaller slice o the market share than the lay-person and even the student o empire might anticipate.

Media ecologiesby which we mean the combination o textual andtechnological environments in which books circulated through empire

were crucial to these imperial textual ormations, in which a book o the daymade its career. As printing innovations spread across empire, they were

taken up by existing institutions and brought new ones into being. Princelystates acquired show presses; large metropolitan publishing companiessought to extend their reach in colonial markets, which in turn shaped them;evangelical organizations whether Hindu reormist, Protestant, or Muslimacquired presses that eatured as protagonists in their reorming accountso themselves; colonial states undertook large volumes o printing; privatecompanies whether British or indigenous were a substantial sector: as Ul-rike Starks account o the Nawal Kishore Press in Lucknow demonstrates,the company employed 350 handpresses, a considerable number o steampresses, and nine hundred employees producing material in a range olanguages.Aricans trained in Protestant evangelical settings establishedpresses ofen in the teeth o racist opposition rom white journeymen whosaw printing as the preserve o the white man.

Printers moved in and between these settings, producing worlds oconicted but cosmopolitan print activity. Port cities drew together dia-

sporic printers, whether Indian, Arican, Chinese, or British, who mightnd themselves in evangelical presses, colonial state operations, privateconcerns large or small. Many started their own operations, generally tenu-ous jobbing presses. Tese not only undertook commercial work but alsoprinted periodicals and pamphlets in various languages (and scripts) thatgave expression to the new sets o transnational alignments that mass migra-tion produced. As many scholars have demonstrated, movements like Sikhinternationalism, imperial citizenship, theosophy, Susm, pan-Buddhism,

pan-Islam, Arican nationalism, Hindu reormism, and ideals o the whiteworking man were ueled by small presses and printed matter that linkedtogether ar-ung constituents.


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At a minimum, this emerging conguration o the artisanal multilin-gual presses and the periodicals and pamphlets they produced redirectsour attention to the themes o the imperial commons and requires us torethink the proportional role o the single-authored book as the distinctive

textual orm in the age o empire. Discussing textual ormations in Arica,Karin Barber has suggested that the term printing cultures may be moreappropriate than print culture with its overtones o vast, monoglot,anonymous, and impersonal address. By contrast, the phrase printingcultures captures the small-scale, artisanal, multilingual operations thatproduced texts rooted in personalized but transnational orms o address.Ofen depending on home-made or home-spun methods (to borrowa term rom Derek Petersons work), such printing cultures were common

across much o empire.Elsewhere in his work on colonial New Zealand,ony Ballantyne has pointed to newspapers and periodicals as materialand semiotic institutions that were involved not only in ideology andrepresentation but also in orming a continuum o materials, skills, tech-nologies, nancial arrangements and cultural conventions.Where books

were expensive and rare, newspapers and periodicals constituted a do-it-yoursel medium or creating personalized collections and scrapbooks.Te newspaper/periodical was a scissors-and-paste affair arising rom theexchange system by which consenting publications agreed to clip mate-rial rom each other.Its cut-and-paste genres trained readers in ongoingcomparative and transnational orms o interpretation; its lack o copy-right normalized a routine disregard or intellectual property law acrossmuch o empire; and its endless circulation o portions o text encourageda model o the author as editor rather than a creative genius producing suigeneris texts.

One amous example o such an artisanal conguration was the Interna-tional Printing Press set up by Gandhi and others in Durban in 1898, which

was made up o personnel rom South India, Gujarat, Mauritius, the CapeColony, Natal, and England. Te press offered printing services in ten lan-guages involving seven different scripts (English, Gujarati, amil, Hindi,Urdu, Hebrew, Marathi, Sanskrit, Zulu, and Dutch). Te newspaper itproduced rom 1903, Indian Opinion, initially appeared in our languagesand our scripts: English, Gujarati, amil, and Hindi. Te newspaper itsel

was never run or prot and in its later years, Gandhi got rid o virtually alladvertising (depending instead on subsidies rom merchants and industri-alists in both South Arica and India). Instead the paper was dedicated to


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Introduction 15

urthering the ideals o satyagraha and the rights o British Indians acrossthe world.

Mrinalini Sinhas account o the world o provincial Indian print andjournalism shows a similar picture, with small-time reorming editors

running multilingual papers, generally on a shoestring budget. Tese pa-pers served as hubs or itinerant journalists, traveling revolutionaries, and

would-be writers to meet either via the publication or in person in thenewspaper offi ces. Sanadhyas text emerged rom precisely such a setting,

where he encountered Benarsidas Chaturvedi, a journalist who took up thecause o Indians overseas and to whom he dictated his story. Derek Peter-sons essay likewise illuminates an Arican world o small artisanal pressesin which Gakaara worked and which he helped establish. Scouting or Boys,

too, even though it emerged rom the heart o the metropolitan mass mediamachine, has its own patched-together book history, as Boehmer detailsin her essay. Te comparative inormality o printing operations, especially

beore the high noon o mechanical reproduction, relativizes existing ideaso global histories o print rooted in ideas o print capitalism, the novel,and the newspaper, which pivot on notions o commodity saturation, intel-lectual property, machine-driven nationalism, and vast monoglot publics.By contrast the small artisanal presses and their products raise themes ophilanthropy, merchant patronage, personalized address in a transnationalmatrix, multilingualism, and variable notions o authorship and copyright.

In the history o print in empire, print-as-empire, all dimensions o theequation remain relevant: there can be no question o either print capital-ism/or artisanal homemade production, just as there can be no questiono the supremacy o the book over other protean or embryonic casts. Tematerial orms in which Gandhis work appeared illustrate this point. His

rst public writing was published serially in 1889 in the Vegetarian; his rstwork between hard covers, in the 1920s. In between, he produced numer-ous pamphlets, generally culled rom the periodicals he edited in South A-rica and India. Hence it took some our decades or Gandhis work to riserom the domain o the periodical and pamphlet to that o the hardbound

book. Tis move was not one that he sought: it was rather thrust upon himas his own stature and that o his work gained international visibility. A lie-long critic o copyright, Gandhi resisted the commoditization o print and

the attempts by the nation-state to claim rights over its reproduction. Hehad little interest in producing expensive volumes and across his lie largely

worked with the periodical and pamphlet.


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Given the particularities o his biography, his charismatic politics, andthe worlds o print rom which his claims to sovereignty emerged, theheterogeneous orms in which Gandhi published may capture the chaoticplurality o printing cultures in empire, but they are not necessarily rep-

resentative o the paper empire whose histories we are trying to nuancehere. Yet i we understand the instability o the book orm as representativeo the historical conditions in which an imperial commons was imaginedand operated, we can better appreciate the book itsel as an illuminatingdyeat once clearing space or and running through empires pathways,consolidating notions o the imperial sel in some places, challenging themin others. In light o recent work that throws the British national-imperiallegal system into question as the sel-directing autonomous export o the

imperial center, it is tempting to range the book alongside the law, that in-imitable index o English civilizational progress, political order, and sel-government. Both the book and the law are exemplary English goodsthat map spaces o extraterritoriality, archive tests o colonial authority andlegitimacy, and offer their users evidence o the thin jurisdictional net oimperial power on the ground.In this sense, in orm and unction theyeach have the capacity to track the spatial variations o imperial sover-eignty that underwrote global cultures o empire, offering us the opportu-nity to see its rifs and ssures, i not its cataclysmic challenges as well. Asassemblages o a patchwork variety o things, the book and the law bothcontain, in other words, the histories o rule and its undoing, the evidenceo imperial legitimacy and its challenges to it. As or books and empire,neither was a coherent or sel-contained thing. Each was, rather, the effecto a set o contingencies and collisions with history on the ground: a pair omoving subjects that, together, congure the history o each in new ways.

Recycling and Upcycling: Genre, Author, Owner

Te periodical was a key textual institution o empire and urnished a seto intersections, an imperial commons rom which new genres, modes oreading, authorship, and ownership could be ashioned. As Sinha shows,Indian-language papers were the rst to give public expression to individ-ual experiences o indentured labor by printing affi davits and sworn state-

ments, a genre o personal testimony that Sanadhya in turn developed. InHind SwarajGandhi mapped an old Indic genre o dialogue onto the tem-plates o mass media by creating a series o exchanges between an Editor


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Introduction 17

and a Reader that mirrored a newspaper encounter in which the Editor hadto speak through the orms o that medium. Scouting or Boysexploited thecut-and-paste orm o the periodical in a spectacular way, appearing in tan-dem with the stable o publications o the magnate C. Arthur Pearson, which

includedDaily Express,Pearsons Weekly, and it-bits. As Boehmer argues, thesuccess o Baden-Powells book pivoted on the way it enacted a networking onetworks, a genre that the imperial periodical embodied in miniature.

Tis pick-and-mix ormat encouraged an idea o reading as shaped bycirculation. Any periodical was a brie thickening o text rom elsewhere,pausing briey courtesy o a reader beore moving on to another destination.

Virtually all o our ten books are dominated by such genres o circulation: theletter, the clipping, the rsum, the extract, Q and A, the tract, the pam-

phlet. Reading ormations likewise bear an imprint o circulation. Severaltexts in this collection depended on international reading circuits or theirsuccess.A Century o Wrongbecame a calling card and item o solidarityacross boundaries. C. L. R. Jamess ideas percolated through cosmopolitanrevolutionary networks, reading groups, debating societies, riendships,and euds. Te charisma o both text and author pulsed through these net-

works. Scouting or Boyscreated the illusion that all scouts, wherever theywere in the world, participated in the same text, which circulated yet appar-ently remained unchanged.

Tese genres o circulation in turn implied ideals o authorship that werecloser to that o the editor than the creative genius. Writing emerged asmuch rom clippings and extracts as rom original composition, as Ballan-tynes account o Wakeeld demonstrates so vividly. Te gure o the edi-tor is present elsewhere: Jane Eyrewas edited by Currer Bell;A Centuryo Wrongwas edited by several hands, most o whose own ers subsequently

disavowed their involvement; Gandhi chose to express himsel through thepersona o the Editor; Scouting or Boyswas composed through an almostabsentminded gathering o textual ragments.

Tis gure o the editor nds its analogue in the idea o the tin trunk asa orm o demotic sel-archiving and mode o composition, as Karin Bar-

ber and Derek Peterson have argued elsewhere.Sanadhya and Gakaaracarted trunks and boxes o documents with them, ofen having to practicesubteruge to keep them rom the attentions o the colonial state (itsel a

conscientious and thorough, i paranoid reader). Gandhi was a great keepero scrapbooks, which traveled with him. Baden-Powell used a metaphoricalling box as a way o generating text.


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18

Editing likewise played a role in constructing ethnic identities. As Pe-terson shows, Gakaara spent his time in a Mau Mau detention camp doingethnography on the Gikuyu, gathering inormation on clans and subse-quently editing it into a series o pamphlets on Gikuyuness. In the case o

A Century o Wrong, the history o Boers was radically edited, their Dutchorigins being excised in avor o starting the story with the advent o Britishimperialism, thereby turning Arikaners into an anticolonial and hence in-

jured people. Te role o editor is perhaps most interesting in Hind Swaraj,where Gandhi sets out his view in the oreword to his maniesto: Teseviews are mine, and yet not mine. Tey are mine because I hope to act ac-cording to them. Tey are part o my being. Yet, they are not mine, becauseI lay no claim to originality. As Suhrud points out, in making this claim,

Gandhi draws on Indic ideas o composition in which the writer-composerarticulates the existing state o knowledge. At the same time, Gandhi alsodraws on his work as a newspaper editor, wherein most o the text thatpassed through his hand came rom other publications. Importantly, Gan-dhi equates authorship with conduct (I hope to act according to them).In this equation, the point o any text is that it can be applied to circum-stances to help the reader to understand them better, and to act with moreinsight. We encounter this model o reading across the essays presentedhere: the point o all ten books was that they be applied to present andpressing circumstances.

oday, this mode o reading would be classied somewhat pejorativelyas didactic, a style that high literary modernism has marginalized by con-structing it as the abject opposite o complexity and irony. aken together,these essays remind us o how global this orm o didactic reading in act

was (and indeed still is). By taking an empire-wide purview, this collection

supports Leah Prices parochialization o hegemonic modes o reading thatwe inherit rom the Victorians.As she argues, today still, ideal reading ispresumed to be continuous (rom beginning to end), to be disembodied,and ideally to have involved book-buying. By contrast, the orms o read-ing discussed in this volume are discontinuous, are ofen embodied, andseldom entailed a book purchase. In empire, novel and tract did not alwaysshun each other and entered alliances, producing demotic styles o readingthat revise dominant assumptions about what reading is.

Such demotic styles o reading were urther encouraged by ideas oownership and copyright, in turn shaped by the model o author-as-editor.Strikingly, across these ten essays, there is no discussion o copyright.


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Introduction 19

While the big books were copyrighted and embodied an imperial ordero intellectual property (itsel a conused terrain where national modelso copyright were awkwardly and ineffectually thrust upon transnationalspaces),most o the books discussed here embody an idea o common-

right. I books were miscellanies composed o bits and pieces, then theywere texts in which everyone could share and have a share.Tere was noauthor who claimed prior ownership. Te tracts and pamphlets discussedhere were authorless, they were cheap or ree, and their point was to bepassed rom hand to hand. Scouts literally shared their manuals. Gandhi, asnoted, rejected copyright, and the rst English edition o Hind Swarajspe-cically indicated that there were No Rights Reserved, a phrase invitingreaders to reproduce their own copies and reely share in the book.

In terms o reading rhythms, these essays suggest a variety o tempos: thesedate and solemn pace o reading Macaulay; the urgency o Pearson andA Century o Wrong; the possession o Jane Eyre; the stop-and-start styleo Scouting or Boys; the serialization o Wakeelds Letter to Sydney. Gan-dhis dialogue required pausing and rereading, a mode that sought to turnthe haste o discontinuous periodical reading against itsel. Tese rhythmsthemselves carried implications about time and sovereignty, about whoshould own the uture and how. o readNational Lie and Characterwasto become anxious about imminent loss. o read Hind Swarajwas to tryand pause industrial time to create, however eetingly, a miniature sover-eignty in the sel. o readA Century o Wrongwas to participate in an ur-gent and potentially catastrophic present. o read Te Black Jacobinswas toanticipate allegorically the in dependence o Aricanot as a ait accompli

but as a process unolding in real time, in part by building on long historieso powerul, highly mobile ideas generated by and sustained in the imperial

commons.aken together, these various modes o reading and writing today may

strike us as unusual since like many imaginaries, they have been obscuredin retrospect by the hegemony o the nation-state. Tis point is poignantlyunderlined by the number o tenuous or even imaginary textual sites thatemerge rom these essays. Gakaara dreamed o running a big and popu-lar bookshop, where while writing I can deal with selling o books romother countries, be an agent or books and periodicals, school materials,

stationeries, sports equipment etc. Te journalist Chaturvedi, whose con-nections with Sanadhyas work Sinha mentions, likewise had a daydream,this time about owning a press o his own, supported by a library and news


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agency that would serve the cause o overseas Indians. In both cases,these imagined scenes place their protagonists in the midst o transnationalnetworks whose import today is no longer ully understood. Similarly inSuhruds essay, Gandhis ashram emerges as a ragile space in which to prac-

tice Gandhian ideas o sovereignty as rooted in the individual rather thanan abstract territorialized nation-state. Gandhis ashrams were also readingand writing communes, rom some o which newspapers were produced.Both Sanadhya and Chaturvedi spent periods living on the ashram Sabar-mati, which provided intellectual reuge or those whose projects did notinhereor nd tractionin the imperial nation-state.

Judging Tis Book by Its CoverWhat, in the end, is the relationship between these ten books and histori-cal change in the modern British Empire? Te idea that books can shapeempires is provocative, conjuring the kind o spectacular impact authorsalways, i secretly, seek when they write books. Te rate at which booksabout empire, especially the British Empire, continue to be produced andto y off the shelwhether historical polemic (Niall FergusonsEmpire:Te Rise and Demise o the British World Order and the Lessons or Global

Power), creative nonction (William Dalrymples White Mughals), or his-torical ction (Amitav Ghoshs Sea o Poppies)speaks to a long-standingreader desire, reanimated by the crisis o American imperialism beore oureyes, to grapple with empire as a motor o history, i not as the engine ocontemporary events and apprehensions as well.

Yet, as we have been arguing here, the ten books whose contributionsto the kind o imperial commons we have investigated here are less an en-

gine than a camera.

Rather than connecting the dots between a singlespine and a cataclysmic imperial event or events, they capture a variety okinds o historical change, typically over a long time, whether decades ormore. Using them as a springboard, we ask how, why, and under what con-ditions such change happens, what its modalities and delivery systems are,and what the timing o impact is over the longue dure. o be sure, bookscan be preternaturally deant, taking aim at powerul structures with theintention o xing them as objects o critique and, with the kind o utopian

energy perhaps uniquely propelled by the book orm, with the hope o dis-mantling them in the process. Tis might be said o Jane Eyreor Century


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Introduction 21

o Wrong. Each was motivated by a passionate sense o injusticeaboutthe way imperial political economies shaped English womens choices andexperiences, about how narratives o one violent event threw the wholesystem o imperial justice into question or a nationalist community like

the Arikaners, respectively. Te prison writings o Wakeeld and Gakaarathat gave shape toLetter rom SydneyandMhrga ya Agkywere also actso deance, as was Hind Swaraj, albeit in a characteristically Gandhian way.Meanwhile, the impact o a text like Scouting or Boyscan hardly be denied,though its publication was not a singular clat but a tentacled, snaking path-

way o inuence on the adolescent psyche, both imperial and colonial. Aprimer or empire identication and the promise o transnational connec-tion or all those who wanted to read it, its pedagogical career represents

the transormation o the imperial ideal rom a local metropolitan aspira-tion to a global phenomenon. As with Macaulays History, a genealogy oPowells primer shows us the technologies o historical change at work over

broad reaches o space and time yet intimately as well, in the hearts andminds o readers who might have no direct encounter with empire other-

wise but who became amiliar with its plots and possibilities via these big,enduring books.

Te same can and should be said o humbler, down-market publica-tions like Sanadhyas Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh. But how, you might ask,can such an apparently microhistorical work make any claim on imperialhistory, let alone on the category o historical inuence? In Sinhas read-ing, Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh is not the exception that makes the rule;quite the contrary. Her account compels us to rethink the direct-hit logic ochallenge and inuence that lingers even and especially in an age o post-structural and postcolonial assemblage, precisely because she recenters the

motors o transormation at the heart o communities o print and politicsthat are rankly scarcely visible except through a materialist book historylike this one. Sanadhyas book did not bring about the end o indenture.Tere was no clat: its work was perpetually dispersed and dispersing. Andit looks subterraneanbelow the sightline o empire properonly withrespect to dominant vectors o imperial power and authority, which werenot in any case its exclusive or intended audiences. What is truly provoca-tive about Sanadhyas book is that it gives readers o imperial history an

opportunity to resuscitate one o the possibilities o a subaltern method:an approach that emphasizes not just resistance to imperial authority and


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its representatives but comparative indifference to them as well. Tat is tosay, the effi cacy o Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varshlay not simply in its challengeto the vertical spine o imperial power but in its movement through the in-terstices o the imperial system. Its target was the unsupportable condition

o imperial capital, and it operated horizontally against it, snakinglikeBaden-Powells Scouting or Boysthrough the capillaries o that power,making lateral connections to do its work in the world and to achieve whatminor success it had. Much the same could be said o Gakaaras pamphlet,a text indifferent to high anti-imperial registers and written instead in themoral idiom o slow reorm.

Tose who study, or who otherwise appreciate, the materiality o thebook will tell you that titles, like covers, matter. Tey are like vestibules,

staging the inner chambers o the space about to be entered and announc-ing the design, architectural and otherwise, o what is to come.Like allstaging devices, titles set expectations into motion, in this case on the veryspine: that vertical axis that organizes the contents and directs the readertoward a horizon, an argument, a monographic set o claims. Echoingobjectivist standards or historical change, a books title bears the burdeno showing, even proving, its accomplishments. For those seeking a literalreading o books +empire =impact, we have one smoking gun. As MarilynLake details in her essay on Pearson, the connection between his book andthe White Australia policy is clear and direct, practically irreutable. I it

were needed, a case could equally be made or the causative effects o TeBlack Jacobins, that bible o global revolutionary realization that had materialconsequences or postcolonial Caribbean governmentality in personnel: Eric

Williams was the rst prime minister o rinidad and obago, afer all. I apost-Enlightenment preoccupation with authorship has distorted our view

o the centrality o books (and vice versa),

the history o C. L. R. Jamessclassic illustrates how one book rarely acts alone. As Kamugishas essay soskillully shows, Te Black Jacobins was a camera and a catalyst, clashingand meshing with a variety o other books o its time to shape political out-comes in real time and over the long haul as well.

Tere are other twinnings among our ten books, pairings that suggestthat the singularity o the book as an inuence peddler should be urtherprovincialized beyond the print culture upcyclings and recyclings we have

materialized here. We have already spoken o the orward/backward mo-tion oJane Eyreand Wide Sargasso Sea; Boehmer discusses the relationship


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Introduction 23

between Baden-Powell and Kipling; and the intellectual slanging matchesbetween James and Williams were utterly consequential to the impact otheir work, on each other and on haltingly, tully postimperial worlds theytraveled in and helped to make. In this sense, reproportioning the book as

a multiorm commodity, whether via an appreciation o its hybrid textualhistories or via its conjuncture with other spindled texts, both mirrors andmaps the dispersed assemblage o imperial spaces and placesthe com-municative empirethat the itineraries o our ten books make visible.More precisely, the travels and travails o the book in/and empire allowus to see how and why the imperial commons we have evinced was bothintegrated intellectually andperpetually disintegrated by the myriad sub-

jects and agents who constructed, lived inside, and sought to exceed its ter-

ritorial and epistemological rames. In this sense, historical change can besensational, but it is also always already immanent and ubiquitous; revo-lutionary and melodramatic andendemic to everyday writing and readingpractices, as it is to quotidian experiences in all their imperial variety andcontingency.

Te rise-and-all narrative o British imperialism, which has impresseditsel on nearly every spine in the historiography o empire and continuesto shape contemporary headlines about the end o history in politics andacademia alike, does not necessarily allow or this kind o reading. Indeed,aided by the antecedent o Rome, it constitutes both a description o theBritish Empires ate and a method, albeit a limiting one, or historiciz-ing it as well. Te tenacity o this arc makes the claims about books andchange we are advancing here seem counterintuitive, when in act they arecommonsensical, given, at least, the par ticular book and empire historiesthis collection archives. What Kath Weston in another context has called

the long, slow burn is a much more historically accurate account o howchange happens than the drama o rise and all that has been the explana-tory ramework or empire tout court. It is no small irony that a studyo booksthose disappearing occasions or long-orm thinking and slowreadingshould be one o the most effective ways o dramatizing the lim-its o the climactic end o empire or the momentous challenge that ushersin revolutionary change. Its also a testimony to the resilience o books,and o empires, that or all the hype around their disappearance, they are,

or the moment anyway, not quite yet in the rearview mirror o history.As we have endeavored to show in what ollows, thinking them together,


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as makers o an imperial assemblage always in process, still has relevanceor understanding how change happensand or choosing with vigilanceand care the lenses through which we diagnose its symptoms and histori-cize its possibilities.

N O T E S

1. Ben Kaa, Te Demon o Writing: Powers and Failures o Paperwork(Cam-bridge, MA: Zone Books, 2012).

2. Javed Majeed, Whats in a (Proper) Name? Particulars, Individuals, and Author-ship in the Linguistic Survey o India and Colonial Scholarship, inKnowledge Produc-tion, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, ed. Daud Ali and Indra Sengupta(New York: Palgrave, 2011). More indirectly, see Ann Laura Stoler,Along the ArchivalGrain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense(Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2010), 616662.

3. Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British andForeign Bible Society(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12.

4. Isabel Homeyr, Te Portable Bunyan: A ransnational History o Te PilgrimsProgress(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Ann Rigney, Te Afer-lives o Walter Scott: Memory on the Move(Oxord: Oxord University Press, 2012), 17.

5. Jonathan Plotz,Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move(Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2009), xiii.

6. Te literature on paper empire as well as paper (and books) in empire sprawlsin several directions, as shown in the ollowing categories, in each o which we listsome key titles. Empire and inormation: C. A. Bayly,Empire and Inormation: Intelli-gence Gathering and Social Communication in India, (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms o Knowledge:Te British in India(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Writing andgovernance: Adam Ashorth, Te Politics o Discourse in wentieth-Century SouthArica(Oxord: Clarendon Press, 1990); Stoler,Archival Grain; Tomas Richards, TeImperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy o Empire(London: Verso, 1993); MikesOgborn,Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making o the English East India Company(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2007). Te precolonial book: Shamil Jeppieand Souleymane Bachir Diagne, eds., Te Meanings o imbuktu(Pretoria: HumanSciences Research Council Press, 2008). Manuscript cultures: Sheldon Pollock, TeLanguage o the Gods in the World o Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern

India(Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 2006). Print technology in empire andbeyond: Nile Green, Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution: Industrialization,Evangelicalism, and the Birth o Printing in Early Qajar Iran, Comparative Studies oSouth Asia, Arica and the Middle East30, no. 3 (2010): 473490; Sydney Shep, Map-ping the Migration o Paper: Historical Geography and New Zealand Print Culture,in Te Moving Market, ed. Peter Isaac and Barry Mackay (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll


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Introduction 25

Press, 2001), 179192. Itinerant printers in empire: or research on British printers,see (Scottish Archive o Print and Publishing History Records), www.sapphire.ac.uk/, accessed 1 April 2014. Muslim print culture: Francis Robinson, echnol-ogy and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact o Print,Modern Asian Studies27,no. 1 (1993): 229251; Nile Green,Bombay Islam: Te Religious Economy o the Western

Indian Ocean(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Christian mission print-ing: Homeyr,Portable Bunyan; Howsam, Cheap Bibles. Ethnographies and historieso reading and writing: Sean Hawkins, Writing and Colonialism in North Ghana:Te Encounter between the LoDagaa and the World on Paper, (oronto:University o oronto Press, 2002); Archie Dick, Te Hidden History o South AricasBook and Reading Culture(oronto: University o oronto Press, 2012); Karin Barber,ed.,Aricas Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and the Making o the Sel(Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 2006); Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: ranslation,Bookkeeping and the Work o the Imagination in Colonial Kenya(Portsmouth, NH:

Heinemann, 2004). Orality and literacy: Ruth Finnegan, Orality and Literacy: Teechnologizing o the Word(London: Routledge, 1982). ransnational history o the

book: afer being dominated by national histories o the book, this eld has started toexploit the inherently transnational capacities o the book. Bill Bell, Crusoes Books:Te Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nineteenth Century, inAcross Boundaries: TeBook in Culture and Commerce, ed. Bill Bell, Philip Bennett, and Jonquil Bevan (NewCastle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 116129; Rimi B. Chatterjee,Empires o the Mind:A History o the Oxord University Press in India under the Raj(New Delhi: Oxord Uni-versity Press, 2006); Robert Fraser,Book History through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting

the Script(London: Routledge, 2008); Priya Joshi,In Another Country: Colonialism,Culture, and the English Novel in India(New Delhi: Oxord University Press, 2002);Martyn Lyons and John Arnold, eds.,A History o the Book in Australia : ANational Culture in a Colonised Market(St. Lucia: University o Queensland Press,2001); James Raven,London Booksellers and American Customers: ransatlantic Liter-ary Community and the Charleston Library Society, (Columbia: University oSouth Carolina Press, 2002); Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, eds.,Books withoutBorders, vol. 1, Te Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture(London: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2008).

7. Jasbir Puar, errorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer imes(Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 194.

8. Te phrase is John Darwins. See his Imperialism and the Victorians: Te Dynam-ics o erritorial Expansion,English Historical Review112, no. 447 (1997): 614642.

9. Isabel Homeyr, Gandhis Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading(Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 6.

10. Plotz,Portable Property, 21.11. Lawrence Lessig, Te Future o Ideas: Te Fate o the Commons in a Connected

World(New York: Random House, 2001), 17.

12. Tis discussion o the commons is drawn rom Lessig, Te Future o Ideas, 1923(quotes rom pp. 19 and 20); Eva Hemmungs Wirtn, erms o Use: Negotiating theJungle o the Intellectual Commons(oronto: University o oronto Press, 2008).


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13. On American reprints, see Meredith L. McGill,American Literature and the Cul-ture o Reprinting, (Philadelphia: University o Pennsylvania Press, 2003); onevangelical printing see Howsam, Cheap Bibles; on imperial periodicals see Homeyr,Gandhis Printing Press, ch. 3.

14. Alexander Peukert, Te Colonial Legacy o the International Copyright

System, in Staging the Immaterial: Rights, Style and Perormance in Sub-Saharan Arica,ed. Ute Rschenthaler and Mamadou Diawara (Oxord: Sean Kingston, orthcom-ing); Lionel Bently, Te Extraordinary Multiplicity o Intellectual Property Law inthe British Colonies in the Nineteenth Century, Teoretical Inquiries in Law12, no. 1(2011): 161200.

15. For an account o this process, see Alison Rukavina, Te Development o theInternational Book rade, (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan,2010). For a more Whiggish account, see Catherine Seville, Te Internationalisation oCopyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Rosemary Coombe has made the pointthat the Protestant evangelical publishing endeavor ostered a view o texts, whatevertheir message, ostering one meaning and message, an idea she suggests eeds backinto metropolitan ideas o copyright and its assumption that texts must be madeequivalent and equitable. Rosemary J. Coombe, Authorial Cartographies: MappingProprietary Borders in a Less-Tan-Brave New World, Stanord Law Review48, no.1357 (1996): 2.

16. Karin Barber, Authorship, Copyright and Quotation in Oral and Print Spheresin Early Colonial Yorubaland, in Staging the Immaterial: Rights, Style and Perormance

in Sub-Saharan Arica, ed. Ute Rschenthaler and Mamadou Diawara (Oxord: SeanKingston, orthcoming).

17. Emily Apter,Against World Literature: On the Politics o Untranslatability(Lon-don: Verso, 2013), 329.

18. Homeyr, Gandhis Printing Press, 13.19. For one excellent bottom-up example, see Michael D. Birnhack, Colonial Copy-

right: Intellectual Property in Mandate Palestine(Oxord: Oxord University Press, 2012).20. As Leslie Howsam has observed, Victorian readers remain the shadowy

accomplices o authors and publishers. Leslie Howsam,Kegan Paul and Victorian Im-print: Publishers, Books and Cultural History(oronto: and University o orontoPress, 1998), 11.

21. Firdous Azim, Te Colonial Rise o the Novel(London: Routledge, 1994).22. Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt sing, eds., Words in Motion: oward a

Global Lexicon(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 5 and ollowing.23. Homeyr,Portable Bunyan, 25.24. Gluck and sing, Words in Motion, 12; see also epilogue to C. L. Innes,A History

o Black and Asian Writing in Britain(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),233252.

25. For a superb rendering o the ad hoc origins and composition o the nineteenth-century empire, see Dane Kennedy, Te Great Arch o Empire, in Te VictorianWorld, ed. Martin Hewett (London: Routledge, 2012), 5772.


34/35

Introduction 27

26. Martyn Lyons and Lucy aksa,Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History oReading (Melbourne: Oxord University Press, 1992), acing p. 120.

27. Peter Stallybrass, What Is a Book?, lecture, Centre or the Study o the Book,Bodleian Library, University o Oxord, 13 April 2010.

28. Leah Price, How to Do Tings with Books in Victorian Britain(Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2012).29. Stallybrass, What Is a Book?30. See note 2.31. Ulrike Stark,An Empire o Books: Te Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion o the

Printed Word in Colonial India(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).32. Chatterjee,Empires o the Mind; Joshi,In Another Country; Howsam, Cheap

Bibles(which demonstrates how the demand or bound Bibles across the Christianmission empire transormed the bookbinding industry rom an artisanal affair to amodern mass-production operation); Green,Bombay Islam; Graham Shaw, Commu-

nications between Cultures: Diffi culties in the Design and Distribution o ChristianLiteratures in Nineteenth-Century India, in Te Church and the Book, ed. R. N.Swanson (Woodbridge, England: Boydell, 2004), 339356; Lal Chand and Sons, State-Owned Printing Presses and Teir Competition with Private rade(Calcutta: Lal Chandand Sons, 1923).

33. On diasporic artisanal printers see Homeyr, Gandhis Printing Press, ch. 1. Ontransnational movements, print culture, and port cities see Mark Ravinder Frost, Wider Opportunities: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the GlobalDimension in Colombo, 18701920,Modern Asian Studies36, no. 4 (2002): 937967.

34. Karin Barber, Audiences and the Book, Current Writing13, no. 2 (2001): 919.35. Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, Introduction: Homespun Historiog-

raphy and the Academic Proession, in Recasting the Past: History Writing and PoliticalWork in Modern Arica, ed. Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (Athens: OhioUniversity Press, 2009), 130.

36. ony Ballantyne, Reading the Newspaper in Colonial Otago,Journal o NewZealand Studies12 (2011): 4950. Anna Johnston, Te Paper War: Morality, PrintCulture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales(Crawley: University o Western

Australia Publishing, 2011). On newspapers and periodicals in empire, see Milton

Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian NationalistStruggle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Simon J. Pot-ter,News and the British World: Te Emergence o an Imperial Press System(Oxord:Oxord University Press, 2003); Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: Te British Pressand India, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); ChandrikaKaul, ed.,Media and the British Empire(Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmil-lan, 2006); David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers, eds., Negotiating India in theNineteenth-Century Media(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Julie F. Codell,Introduction: Te Nineteenth-Century News rom India, Victorian PeriodicalsReview37, no. 2 (2004): 106123; Julie F. Codell, Getting the wain to Meet: GlobalRegionalism in East and West: A Monthly Review, Victorian Periodicals Review37,no. 2 (2004): 214232; Sukeshi Kamra, Te Indian Periodical Press and the Production o


35/35

Nationalist Rhetoric(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); J. Don Vann and Rosemary. van Arsdel, eds.,Periodicals o Queen Victorias Empire: An Exploration(oronto:University o oronto Press, 1966). Also: Ellen Gruber Garvey, Scissorizing andScrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating, inNewMedia, , ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA:

Press, 2003), 207227.37. On the exchange system, see Garvey, Scissorizing; Ross Harvey, Bringing the

News to New Zealand: Te Supply and Control o Overseas News in the NineteenthCentury,Media History8, no. 1 (2002): 2134; Richard B. Kielbowicz, Newsgathering

by Printers Exchanges beore the elegraph,Journalism History9, no. 2 (1982): 4248.38.Indian Opinion, 4 June 1903.39. Lauren Benton,A Search or Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Em-

pires, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 101.40. Karin Barber, Introduction: Hidden Innovators in Arica, in Barber, Hidden

Histories, 124; Peterson and Macola, Recasting the Past.41. Price, How to Do Tings with Books.42. Seville, Te Internationalisation o Copyright Law, 26.43. Tis idea is drawn rom Andrew Piper,Dreaming in Books: Te Making o the Bib-

liographic Imagination in the Romantic Age(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2009).44. Benarsidas Chaturvedi, Te Ashram o My Dreams,Indians Overseas: Weekly

Letter, 14 November 1923, Benarsidas Chaturvedi Papers, National Archives o India,Delhi.

45. Signicantly, this interpretive angle comes out o critiques o the empire o the

ree market. See Donald Mackenzie,An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial ModelsShape Markets(Cambridge, MA: Press, 2008).

46. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody, eds.,Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans,Publishers, Designers and the Marketing o Fiction(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), xi.

47. James Wald, Periodicals and Periodicity, inA Companion to the History o theBook, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell,2009), 429.

48. Kath Weston,Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science(New York: Rout-ledge, 1998).

49. Angus Philipps, Does the Book Have a Future?, in Eliot and Rose, Companion,547559.

ten books that shaped the british empire edited by burton and hofmeyr

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