Introduction: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print

Abstract

A growing literature explores the varying role of print media in the colonial world and the new types of publics such newspapers and periodicals produced. However, this literature has tended to focus on specific regions, and has often sidestepped the larger question of how to conceptualise the relationship between print media and colonial rule. While some have used the term ‘colonial public sphere’ or ‘colonial publics,’ others have preferred to avoid these terms and instead thought in terms of multiple and overlapping publics. What this literature has shown is that a single analytic model for analysing public spaces of discourse is not usable. In this Introduction to our Special Issue we propose a new framework for studying the publics created through print media in the colonial world. We outline a set of four factors – addressivity, performativity, materiality and periodicity – that can be applied to specific historical case studies. We then explain how the issue as a whole models this methodology as a means to analyse how print media (as one medium within the public sphere) functioned in specific colonial and semi-colonial spaces around the world.

Colesworthy Grant's Portraits of Colonial Society in India: Lithography, Liberalism, and the Global Making of Middle‐Class Culture, c. 1833–57

“…44 Instead, costume albums and ethnographic imagery began to participate in an intertextual culture of international news and fashion, characterized by serialization and the 'periodicity' of regular publishing rhythms; the cultivation of middle-class and female audiences; the marketing of prints within periodicals that defined middle-class taste; and the construction of both amateur engagement and artistic value through complex relationships between lithographic illustrations and more traditional and expensive artistic commodities, such as albums of hand-coloured aquatints. 45 Crucially, the first lithographic press was established in India in 1821, just four years after Ackermann's began publishing in London, and was similarly devoted 'chiefly if not solely' to the promotion of amateur drawing. 46 Rather than conceptualizing lithography's impact on print consumption as primarily driven by metropolitan developments, it thus seems more accurate to consider early British lithography as a transimperial phenomenon, travelling and intersecting with the global dimensions of British amateurism -the result of sketching's prominent place in the curricula of the military and commercial academies that trained Britain's merchants, soldiers, and colonial officials, including the East India Company's college at Haileybury and its military seminary at Addiscombe.…”