Volume 301, Issue 2 -

The adverse political conditions that haunted authors in Central Europe are well-known features of the Restoration and Vormärz eras, and their letters and texts about censorship provide excellent source material to highlight state repression. But such evidence has the effect of overshadowing the surprising record of success among publishers to market their works. Focusing on publishers, this essay hazards a broad, mid-level analysis of censorship that reconfigures existing definitions and interpretations. Using Prussia, Saxony, and the German Confederation as case studies, this essay sketches the broader perspective of publishers working with, and around, censorship regimes. In spite of the numerous setbacks of individual authors and texts, publishers dismantled the “information order” of Restoration Germany. The dynamics of a liberal market economy, buttressed by a legal system and a civil society that promoted the protection and movement of goods, contributed to a robust demand for political print. Censors furthermore exhibited a range of attitudes, which included cooperation in moving controversial texts to market. In demonstrating just how much forbidden literature reached German readers, and in revising the outcomes of state regulation, this essay opens up clearer sightlines for conceptualizing the transfer and development of political literacies in western and central Europe.

With the firm establishment of Global History as a new subfield historical research has rediscovered its interest in transregional and global connections as economically, socially and culturally shaping elements. Countless studies in the field build on the implicit assumption that an increase and intensification of global connections feeds back into the societies and actors connected in a way that eventually leads to the unfolding of substantial local changes. While this certainly holds true in many cases, accepting this basic assumption at the same time obstructs our analytical view of the interface between global connection and local manifestation. This article uses the example of the telegraph network in the 19th and early 20th centuries to shed some more light on this very interface and to identify the precise point, at which more connectivity suddenly creates a different quality of connection; at which more connectivity suddenly means different connectivity. The case studies employed to this end all hail from the field of crime or crime prevention by means of telegraph. It will be seen that this particular field serves us well to make the qualitative changes ushered in by telegraphic connectivity tangible due to its close relation to questions of control and the evasion of control.