Circulating commodities: The role of George Robertson, Edward Petherick, George P. Brett, and other publishers and distributors in the late nineteenth-century expansion of the international book trade.

摘要

My study examines the development of the international book trade in English-language books between 1870 and 1895 and traces the business transactions of a number of publishers, booksellers, and distributors whose businesses spanned the globe. While an international book trade existed before the late nineteenth century, during this period a combination of different social, cultural, political, and economic factors forced publishers and booksellers in the Western world to look for and enter into new markets. Whereas previously international book sales were not a necessary component of success, colonial booksellers, distributors, and publishers, such as George Robertson and Edward Petherick, and British publishing firms, such as Richard Bentley and Son and Macmillan, sought to establish direct relations with each other in order to promote not only the sale of British books in the colonies but also the creation of editions specifically for the colonial market. Moreover, British, European, and American publishing firms had to negotiate with Robertson and Petherick in order to gain entrance into the burgeoning Australasian, colonial, and foreign markets for English-language books. The late-nineteenth century is a period of negotiation, collaboration, and competition as publishers, distributors, and authors increasingly looked beyond their own national borders for solutions to problems with book piracy and copyright that plagued the trade, as well as for opportunities to enlarge the sales of their publications.;I analyze the theory and methodology traditionally used in Print Culture and argue that existing theory, such as Robert Darnton's communications circuit, often forces the history of print to fit into a national and synthetic mould. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's field of cultural production offers a more contextual theory of book production and circulation; he examines the field of cultural production as the product of practices of fluid social networks and relationships. While Bourdieu offers a contextualized framework for the study of the international book trade, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari provide a vocabulary for clarifying the power dynamics of the trade that complements the unpredictable movement of books and people on the international stage.