Introduction: Rethinking Colonial Print through Practices

Abstract What was colonial about colonial print culture? By analyzing the social and material dimensions of print—its practices, communities, networks, and technologies—our special issue probes whether and how colonialism shaped the specific print cultures that took shape across varied and geographic and temporal contexts. In so doing, we contribute to a wide-ranging intervention on print that has, in recent decades, dismantled teleological narratives linking global modernity with the diffusion of European printing. Contributors make the case for situating histories of print and the public sphere within the world of comparative social analysis, rather than singularly within book, cultural, or intellectual history. By attending to the materiality of printing and the ground-level practices and “tactics” of production and circulation, contributors not only reveal the wide range of social actors who helped to shape the uses and meanings of print—including colonial and postcolonial officials and journalists as well as manufacturers, artisans, merchants, and collectors—but also identify overlooked connections within and between regions that linked practitioners and readers rooted in diverse colonial and postcolonial contexts. Rather than charting a linear march towards mass printing or a homogenous global printing industry, the essays highlight the temporal asymmetries of colonial printing and the political and economic forces and human actors that shaped the specific regional and local trajectories of print.