Printing Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract This article reconstructs the commercial networks and practical strategies that Latin American and Caribbean printers developed to acquire equipment and supplies in the nineteenth century. It argues that the exchange of letters, catalogues, and technologies at printers’ behest constituted a transnational printing capitalism that linked practitioners in newly independent Latin American nations and Spanish Caribbean colonies with key manufacturing cities like New York and Philadelphia. In contrast to Benedict Anderson’s notion of print capitalism, which foregrounds readers and shared reading practices as the basis of national identity, the article examines how the simultaneous experiences of building local printing trades after colonialism—and the subsequent emergence of new imperial projects by the end of the nineteenth century—shaped transnational professional imaginaries among craftsmen throughout Latin America. Far from a deterministic relationship in which technology shaped subjectivity, the creation of print’s material infrastructures was itself rooted in social relationships that changed over time. By examining these shifting relations, the article contributes to scholarship that is “relativizing” Anderson’s concept in diverse historical contexts.