Messengers of Empire: Print and Revolution in the Atlantic World

Published by Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (2023)

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This book examines how news and information moved across the Atlantic world during the Age of Sail. It provides a groundbreaking look at how the French Revolutionary Wars impacted the development of communication channels, such as the creation of regular postal services in the Caribbean and increased reliance on local printers to produce print material faster and more effectively. It consults a range of archival sources that have rarely, if ever, been used before, including correspondence dispatches, newspapers, calendars, almanacs, tarot cards, public notices, and even documents detailing secret society meetings. In doing so, this book reveals how imperial communication networks functioned at the ground level, as well as who were the gatekeepers of information in areas far removed from the metropoles.

Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century: Ideas and Materialities c. 1650–1850

Published by Boydell & Brewer Press (2024)

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Francesco A. Morriello, Chapter 9: “The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser Antilles”

This edited volume examines how differences in the material production and circulation of textual objects transformed the ways in which knowledge was formulated and received between 1650 and 1850. Essays focus on diverse regions of Britain and Europe, European colonies in the Caribbean and North America, India and East Asia. In pursuing global perspectives, thirteen cultural and literary historians, collectively reassess Eurocentric interpretations of a republic of letters, a public sphere, an invention of the self and a reading revolution. They further challenge the extent to which European periodizations of “the Enlightenment” map onto processes of technological and intellectual change in other regions of the globe.