This Companion showcases the latest research into British colonial periodicals by leading scholars in the field. The first ever large-scale attempt to gather into one volume research on British colonial periodicals, the chapters in this volume analyse the fundamental role played by colonial periodicals in sustaining as well as contesting the economic, political and cultural hegemony of the British Empire from its inception to its fall. The volume considers both periodicals published in Britain for colonial consumption and those published in British colonies and dominions.
Introduction: British colonial periodicals in context, David Finkelstein and David Johnson Section A: Creating and contesting the colonial public sphere 1. Authorship and collective self-fashioning in Pre-Confederation English Canada, Cynthia Sugars and Paul Keen 2. Early colonial periodicals in nineteenth-century Canada: The Literary Garland in context, Fariha Shaikh 3. The Afro-Caribbean press and the politics of place in Jamaica and Barbados: The Watchman and Jamaica Free Press and The Liberal, Candace Ward 4. Mofussil versus metropolis, subalterns versus seniors: the rise and demise of The Meerut Universal Magazine, Graham Shaw 5. Writing the ‘Wooden World’: periodicals and settler environmental knowledge in colonial New Zealand, Philip Steer 6. British missionary magazines at home and abroad: Southern Africa as topic and Southern Africans as readership, Lize Kriel, Annika Vosseler and Chantelle Finaughty 7. The Sydney Bulletin and the settler colonial subject, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth 8. Periodicals and Australian Federation, Sam Hutchinson 9. The South African News and the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, Jonathan Derrick 10. The West Africa Weekly: commerce, empire and decolonisation, Jonathan Derrick Section B: Women and colonial periodicals 11. Transnational reprinting and the colonial women’s magazine: The Montreal Museum, 1832–34, Honor Rieley 12. The birth of the Australian women’s magazine: The New Idea, 1902–1911, Michelle J. Smith 13. Women’s writing and reporting on women in the Ghanaian and Nigerian Press, ca. 1880–1930s, Katharina Oke 14. Indian women’s pre-independence periodicals in English: The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, Stri-Dharma, and the Indian New Woman, Deborah A. Logan 15. Marriage Hygiene and the internationalisation of eugenical sexology in the 1930s, Tanya Agathocleous, Ruwanthi Edirisinghe, Jessica Lu, Jaïra Placide and Sarah Schwartz Section C: Language in colonial periodicals 16. Making Māori citizens in colonial New Zealand: the role of government niupepa, Lachy Paterson 17. Language and the making of the colonial modern: periodicals from late nineteenth-century Kerala, India, G. Arunima 18. Simple Letters?: British and Pacific literacies in the Victorian missionary periodical, Michelle Elleray 19. Interrogating the imperial factor and convoking black South Africa: the Cape African Newspaper Izwi Labantu, 1897–1909, Janet Remmington 20. Colonial government periodicals in 1920s East Africa: Mambo Leo and Habari, Emma Hunter 21. Print networks and linguistic interaction in the early Yoruba press, Karin Barber 22. Colonial entanglements: Black South African periodicals and the colonial printsphere, 1920s–30s, Corinne Sandwith and Athambile Masola Section D: Trans-colonial connections in colonial periodicals 23. Melodee Wood, Samuel Revans and Company: colonial commercial trade newspapers in the age of Responsible Government 24. Colonial trade identity and labour information exchange in the international typographical trade press, 1840–1910, David Finkelstein 25. The Anglo-Zulu War in the Friend of India: mediation, meaning and authority, Andrew Griffiths 26. British anarchism and the colonial question: the case of Freedom, 1918–1962, Ole Birk Laursen 27. The Atlantic Charter in British colonial periodicals, David Johnson 28. Citation and solidarity: reporting the 1955 Asian-African Conference in African newspapers and periodicals, Christopher J. Lee 29. Non-alignment and Maoist China: Eastern Horizon in the era of decolonisation, 1960–1981, Alex Tickell and Anne Wetherilt Section E: Anti-colonialism in the colonial and postcolonial public sphere 30. For illustrative purposes: Nana Sahib, Jotee Prasad, and representation in British and Anglo-Indian newspapers, Priti Joshi 31. The Indian Newspaper Reports of British India: ‘A Kind of Periodical Press’, Sukeshi Kamra 32. The anticolonial periodical between public and counterpublic: Beacon and Public Opinion in the interwar years, Raphael Dalleo 33. ‘Not a Newspaper in the Ordinary Sense of the Term:’ the geopolitics of the newspaper/magazine divide in the Nigerian Comet, Marina Bilbija 34. Africa in Jamaica: W. A. Domingo, George Padmore, and Public Opinion, Myles Osborne 35. Citizenship, responsibility and literary culture in the university periodical in Eastern Africa: spaces of social production in Busara and its networks, Madhu Krishnan
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. 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).
Reviews for The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals
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
