Caroline Davis is Associate Professor in Publishing in the Department of Information Studies at University College London. Caroline is the author of Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (2013) and African Literature and the CIA (2020); the editor of Print Cultures: A Reader in Theory and Practice (2019); and the co-editor of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015). David Finkelstein is a cultural historian who has published in areas related to print, labour and press history. Recent publications include Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (2018), and the edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (2020), winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its contribution to the promotion of Victorian press studies. David Johnson is Professor of Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation (2012) and Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia (2019); and the co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2008); The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015); and Labour Struggles in Southern Africa (2023). He is the General Editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Key Texts in Anti-Colonial Thought.
This impressive volume brings together a range of colonial periodicals, produced both in Britain and across her colonies, to offer at a glance a multitude of positions on political, societal and economic matters. While commending the sheer scale of this enterprise, the real value of the book also lies in its pulling together of hugely different contexts that were yet linked through the imperial connection. The resulting insights on the colonial public sphere, women, language, trans-colonial networks and anti-imperialist movements as well as the actual processes of production and circulation of printed periodicals, are invaluable for anyone interested in colonial print and its dissemination across the globe. An additional attraction is the rich collection of images that embed the discussions in far more potent ways than a focus on text alone would have done.--Anindita Ghosh, University of Manchester