David Finkelstein, David Johnson and Caroline Davis: The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals

Periodical Studies have gained prominence in recent years, with significant impact on historical, literary and cultural scholarship. This includes research on the British Empire, where “[i]t is now widely accepted that imperial expansion, the popularity of empire, and the rise of the popular press were all inextricably linked during the late nineteenth century” (Kaul 2019, 177). As the volume under review demonstrates, periodicals played an equally vital role in the Empire’s demise. The Companion provides the first major survey of the British colonial press in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is an impressive one. Its 35 chapters – all carefully contextualised and historicised – were written by leading authorities and discuss instructive examples from the mass of periodicals produced in all regions of the Empire, both in English and in local languages. This includes well-recognised titles like The Friend of India, but also ones that have received little scholarly attention to date. Together, the Companion’s essays give a clear picture of how the colonial press helped to secure British power and voiced critique and anti-imperial resistance. In the editors’ words: “The history of the British colonial press […] is a history of the acquisition and utilisation of the tools of print communication for a range of purposes, including the circulation of colonial knowledge across imperial networks; the communication of information about economic activities and political events; the dissemination of metropolitan culture; the provision of entertainment; the creation of communities of readers; the constitution of individual and group identities; and the mobilisation of collective resistance to colonialism” (1–2).

The editors’ aim was to analyse periodicals “in their own terms” (2) rather than treat them as mere repositories of facts, and their introduction already highlights important characteristics of colonial print communication; for example, only lithographic printing made it possible “to reproduce indigenous language material not enabled by the standard lead-typefaces of the early hand and steam-driven presses still in wide use in the colonial print landscape” (3). All chapters address aspects of production, distribution and circulation of the papers they discuss, as well as their materiality and reception. While some periodicals, especially missionary ones, were mainly targeted at readers in Britain, audiences in the colonies comprised expatriates, settlers, administrators and military personnel as well as local readers, and some periodicals, like the Cape Colony’s Izwi Labantu (discussed by Janet Remmington), used different languages to speak to different readerships.

The volume is divided into five parts, all of which cover different regions of the Empire and lead from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Parts I and IV offer the most pertinent insights into the cultural work performed by the colonial press. The 10 chapters in the first section, “Creating and Contesting the Colonial Public Sphere,” explore how periodicals addressed-and created (counter) public spheres in different regions and types of colonies and how they served, or opposed, imperial ideology. For example, Fariha Shaikh’s study of the Montreal-based Literary Garland (1838–51) shows how this periodical for middle-class readers aimed to cultivate “a literary sensibility that was distinctly local to the experiences of settling in early nineteenth-century Canada” (63); it also gave women like Susanna Moodie a literary space to articulate the female experience of Canadian settler colonialism. By contrast, the identity expressed in the Sydney Bulletin (launched in 1880), discussed by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, was “[a]vowedly racist and masculinist” (127) as well as anticolonial-nationalist; at the same time, this “most famous magazine in Australian history” (127) was also an important platform for a distinct Australian literature. The colonial press in (former) slave colonies in the Caribbean faced different conditions than in the settler colonies. Candace Ward investigates two Afro-Caribbean publications, The Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (founded 1829) and the Barbadian Liberal (launched in 1837). Edited by people of colour, both challenged the plantocracy press, while readers “crossed colour lines – from sympathetic white planter-politicians […] to emerging political leaders of the black and brown voting classes” (66).

Part IV, “Trans-Colonial Connections in Colonial Periodicals,” is built on the idea of connected histories of empire, and its seven chapters address different aspects of connectedness: through individual agents (Melodee H. Wood on the editor Samuel Revans, who conducted periodicals in Canada and New Zealand); shared professional identities (David Finkelstein on typographical trade journals); or the transmission of news about other colonies. Andrew Griffith, for example, studies how the Calcutta-based Friend of India engaged with the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, thus putting his emphasis “not on the relationship between metropole and colony but on the relationship between two colonies” (390). Ole Birk Laursen opens yet another transcolonial perspective in his investigation of the London-based Freedom (founded in 1886) and the way it established a dialogue between British anarchists and anticolonial intellectuals; his essay thus “brings anarchism’s core impetus for freedom into closer conversation with colonial subjects’ aspirations for freedom from empire” (404).

The chapters in the other sections are no less instructive. Part II considers “Women and Colonial Periodicals” and illuminates various intersections of gender and colonial power relations. Part III examines “Language and Colonial Periodicals” and thereby also makes the Companion interesting for linguists. English was the lingua franca of the Empire, and the bulk of the colonial press was published in English. However, there were also publications in local languages or in a mix of languages (like the aforementioned Izwi Labantu), and there was no simple equation between language and affirmation or critique of the Empire. The contributions to Part V, “Anti-Colonialism in the Colonial and Postcolonial Public Sphere,” spotlight the important function periodicals performed in spreading critique and, in the twentieth century, in bringing about the end of Empire – despite the censorship they often underwent.

It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the various approaches and the rich material – including well-chosen illustrations – assembled in this volume, whose merits are tied to the quality of its individual contributions as well as the insights to be gained across chapters. The volume corroborates the current view that a simple centre-periphery model is insufficient to explain the relational dynamics of empires. As several chapters make clear, not all print communication in the Empire was conducted through London, and the communication between London and the colonies was not a one-way affair since periodicals often found their way from the colonies to the metropole. As in the case of Samuel Revans, some agents in periodical production were also mobile and operated in various parts of the British Empire. A helpful index allows users of this inspiring book to trace the multiple connections between the chapters and the examples with which they engage. The Companion will be essential reading in (post)colonial and periodical studies for years to come.