9 - The Printing Press and Colonial Newspapers in the Lesser Antilles

Summary

AS THE NUMBER AND activities of printing presses proliferated so spec-tacularly during the second half of the seventeenth century, so did the nature and reach of their activity. So much has been evident in the preceding chapters: that the presses increasingly provided governments, military personnel, religious officials, merchants, finance agents, investors and many others with the ability to reproduce texts and disseminate them to varied reading audiences. Much journalism developed from the con-veyance of business news, and the history of indigenous presses in many colonies, and especially in the Caribbean, reflected the hunger for news of financial and commercial conditions and activities. Caribbean plantation economies in particular became centres of extraordinary global profit, and financial news became imperative. The growth of plantation economies exhibited a close relationship to the growth of publishing industries that served imperial goals.

What has not been as stressed so far, whether concerning financial, religious or political publications, is the speed with which printed production and then, especially during the eighteenth century, circulation might be undertaken. The speed of production and circulation was also startling in comparison to scribal methods. Considerations of speed, however, become more complex as other material conditions, and notably shipping and cargo loading, changed, a transformation often driven by the new needs of expanding and increasingly far-flung colonial territories and global trading and financial relationships.

A fundamental aspect of the reconfiguration of time and space in the traffic in books and print over this period is the changing relationship between the metropole and the distant recipient of its goods – but where developments in the ‘outpost’ (as seen in fascinating focus in Chapter 6) increasingly offered challenges in the interpretation of received materials or even challenged and reshaped the relationship itself. During the eighteenth century, London alone hosted almost 650 printing businesses, while in Paris some 1,224 printing, publishing and bookselling establishments oper-ated between 1788 and 1813. Approximately 47 printers and 179 booksellers and publishers worked in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution.

The contrast with the metropolitan book trades and those of the British and French colonies is all the more dramatic, therefore. Despite Europe's reliance on the printing press, its introduction to the Caribbean colonies came much later.