Abstract
Until recently, historians studying colonial America often disregarded the foreign news that took up the majority of space in colonial newspapers. Now that an Atlantic history paradigm is reshaping our perspective, ‘foreign news’ appears to be of greater importance in understanding early America and its place in a broader circulation of goods, people and ideas throughout the Atlantic world.2
There’s not an ear that is not deaf
But listens to the News.1
Andrew Bradford (1735)
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Notes
See for example, Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
On riots of London cloth-workers, see Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer In Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991) On reports in colonial American newspapers, see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, NY, 2001): 100–1.
Charles Clark in his important work on early American newspapers argues that the readership reached well beyond the target audience. Not only were newspapers discussed and read aloud but were also saved, bound and sometimes annotated. Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York, 1994): 245–8;for a British provincial comparison, see the list of newspapers available along with ‘Coffee, Tea, [and] Chocolate’ as advertised by Child’s coffeehouse in Salisbury, C. Y. Ferdinand, ‘Selling It to the Provinces: News and Commerce Round Eighteenth-Century Salisbury’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Good (London, 1993): 393–411, 401.
See Hunter, Purchasing Identity, 142, 145;On growth of social and circulating libraries in England, see James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford, 1992); and James Raven, ‘Libraries for Sociability: The Advance of the Subscription Library, c. 1700–1850’, in Giles Mandelbrote and Keith Manley (eds), The History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2006): 241–63.
On the early newspapers, see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community, ch. 8 (Oxford, 1986); on comparisons with early British provincial newspapers, see Clark, Public Prints, 57–64.
John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford, CA, 1960): 68, 65–6, 84–5; Immanuel Wallerstein, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York, 1980): 255;BNL, 15–22 Jun 1720; Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New York, 1999): 60–1; Peter Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge, MA, 2000): 89–113; see also, Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton, NJ, 2004).
Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979): 119.
[John Higginson] The Second Part of South-Sea Stock. Being an Inquiry into the Original of Province Bills or Bills of Credit (Boston, MA: for D. Henchman, 1721). Reprinted in Andrew McFarland Davis, Colonial Currency Reprints, 1682–1751, 4 vols (Boston, 1910–11), 2: 304–05.
Kathleen Wilson, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England’, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London, 1995): 237–62, 240–2. Here Wilson is drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of nationalism as an imagined community. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (New York, 1991). For a somewhat different viewpoint, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004).
On the portrayal of credit as feminine, see Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge, 1998): 20–28; Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1993): 44–5; On credit and Fortuna, see Ruth H. Bloch, ‘The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America’, Signs 13 (1987): 37–58.
Paul Mapp, ‘French Reactions to the British Search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay and the Origins of the Seven Years War’, Terrae Incognitae 33 (2001): 13–32, 18, 21. Mapp argues that Anson’s voyage and British efforts to find a Northwest passage to the Pacific convinced the French of a British conspiracy to take control of the Pacific.
See for example, ‘Just imported in the Two Last Ships from London, and to be Sold by DAVID HALL, at the Post Office, the Following Books, viz.’ Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 Dec 1751; [William Bradford], Catalogue of books Just Imported from London and to be Sold by W. Bradford, at the London-Coffee-House (Philadelphia, PA, n.d. [1760]).
George Anson, A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, Glyndwr Williams (ed.) (London, 1974); Pennsylvania Gazette, 27 Jan 1742.
Ibid., 192; and Captain Basil Hall, Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols (London, 1824), 2: 99 quoted in Anson, Voyage Round the World, 383.
On the Spanish galleon and the world-wide circulation of goods and money, see Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, CA, c. 1998) and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
George C. Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman, OK, 1969): 57.
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© 2011 Phyllis Whitman Hunter
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Hunter, P.W. (2011). Transatlantic News: American Interpretations of the Scandalous and Heroic. In: Howsam, L., Raven, J. (eds) Books between Europe and the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305090_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305090_4
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