A Colonial Book Market

This volume provides a wholly original social history of books in late colonial Peru. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward, workshops in Lima and transoceanic imports supplied the market with unprecedented quantities of print publications. By tracing the variety of printed commodities that were circulating in the urban sphere, as well as analysing the spatiality of the trade and the materiality of the books themselves, Agnes Gehbald assesses the meaning of print culture in the everyday lives of the viceroyalty. She reveals how books permeated late colonial society on a broad scale and how they figured as objects in the inventories of diverse individuals, both women and men, who, in previous centuries, had been far less likely to possess them. Deeply researched and profound, A Colonial Book Market uncovers how people in Peruvian cities gained access to reading material and participated in the global Enlightenment project.

A social history of books in Spanish America which traces the reach of reading material in late colonial Peru.

An international trade emerged between 1870-1895 that incorporated the circulation of books among countries worldwide. A history of the social network and select agents who sold and distributed books overseas, this study demonstrates agents increasingly thought of the world as a negotiable, connected system and books as transnational commodities.

This insightful book unfolds the boipara, exploring the acts of thinking and writing about space and place in the context of recent key conversations at the intersections of cultural geographies, mobilities, materialities and heritage studies. This book reconsiders how we can think about space, place and spatialisation using the book market as a case study. Focusing on everyday lived and imagined experiences within the space, it provides insights into the intricacies, complexities and mobilities involved in the many ways in which temporal, material, structural and sensorial experiences of spaces are inter-implicated. As expression and method, this work aims to be a writing of space (rather than a writing about space) produced through the interleafing of the author’s lived spatial experience of the boipara with the stories, experiences and memories of other regulars who have used and continue to use it, along with the non-human materialities and mobilities that characterise it. This book is essential reading for a wide international audience, particularly those interested in the evolving discussions on mobility, or writing about space and place, materiality, assemblage theory and heritage spaces in the South Asian context.

How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire argues that within an entangled web of imperial, colonial and book trade networks books, reading and subscription libraries contributed to a core and peripheral criteria of clubbability used by the "select people"—clubbable settler elite—to vet the "proper sort"—clubbable indigenous elite—as they culturally, economically and socially navigated their way towards membership in colonial clubland. As a microcosm for British-controlled areas of the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, this book assesses the history, membership, growth and collection development of three colonial subscription libraries—the Penang Library in Malaysia, the General Library of the Institute of Jamaica and the Lagos Library in Nigeria—during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work also examines the places these libraries occupied within the lives of their subscribers, and how the British Council reorganized these colonial subscription libraries to ensure their survival and the survival of colonial clubland in a post-colonial world. This book is designed to accommodate historians of Britain and its empire who are unfamiliar with library history, library historians who are unfamiliar with British history, and book historians who are unfamiliar with both topics.

Volume 1 of A History of the Book in America, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, encompasses the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is organized around three major themes: the persisting colonial relationship between European settlements and the Old World; the gradual emergence of a pluralistic book trade that differentiated printers from booksellers; and the transition from a 'culture of the Word', organized around an understanding of print as a vehicle of the sacred, to the culture of republicanism, epitomized by Benjamin Franklin, and culminating in the uses of print during the Revolutionary era. The volume will also describe nascent forms of literary and learned culture (including the circulation of manuscripts), literacy and censorship, orality, and the efforts by Europeans to introduce written literary to Native Americans and African Americans.

When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.