Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay

Abstract

Book Reviews / Comptes rendus / 99 are rather artless presentations of factual information with little attempt to market, sell, or promote goods or services, by the 1780s a variety of appeals to consumers to invest credit in products or services are evident. Most ingenious of these is the attestation by a signed witness to the efficacy of a product or service in an open letter, for the open letter allows one to advertise without being seen to advertise. Mathison offers a fascinating analysis of vocabulary and tropes of advertising and the subtle ways in which they seek to obscure and redefine relationships of patronage. Poems that satirize the practice and content of such oblique advertising through open letters, however, indicate the readers' recognition of this advertising ploy. So along with the developing sophistication of advertising strategies comes a more sophisticated reading public. Mathison's method offers an example of interdisciplinary ambidexterity at its best, though his conclusions about the transparency of advertising practices appear rather belied by his earlier convincing analysis of their obliquity.As a whole, then, the volume chronicles the emergence of broader and more specialized reading publics, and the expansion of commercial possibilities for financing news publication through selling books, medicines, and a variety of goods and services in periodicals. A glossary of terms from the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century book trade would be a valuable addition to the volume to ensure clarity of reference and consistency of usage. In addition, more cross-referencing of the essaysespecially the final fivewould flag the larger, overarching implications of the volume. As it is, the volume presents empirical research which has implications for a revision of the Habermasian paradigm, but does not yet replace that paradigm with a coherent master narrative.