Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America by Michael Eamon (review)

Michael Eamon’s Imprinting Britainexamines the development of the English language press in eighteenth-century Halifax and Quebec to show how Enlightenment ideas contributed to the fashioning of a “ genteelsociability” (14). This sense of sociability in turn informed the various clubs, coffeehouses, and theaters of these two colonial capital cities. Eamon views the press as a principal vehicle in creating a common sense of Britishness among a literate public and in the production of a unified “civil order” (14). His larger conclusion is that, by articulating an inclusive sense of cultural unity, the character of the newspapers in Halifax and Quebec departed radically from that of those in the thirteen colonies that became the United States, which were, as Eamon argues, predicated on espousing republican ideas and the “dismantling of elite structures and colonial privilege” (19). Newspapers, he concludes, were the purview of a narrow English-speaking elite of government officials, merchants, and clergy, a limited literate public who were highly invested in formulating a consensual colonial culture defined by social order, rationality, and colonial growth. The colonial press thus served as a “vehicle of consensus in a turbulent world” (xviii).

This volume offers, for the first time, an admirable taxonomy of the clubs, associations, coffeehouses, theaters, and newspapers in these two cities, with tangential references to activities in Montreal, the largest and most commercially advanced urban community in the province of Quebec. Like Enlightenment savants themselves, the author has keenly sought to classify and itemize in great detail the kinds of associative life that took place among the English-speaking elites of these colonies, complete with several tables describing the membership of clubs, the number and ownership of coffeehouses, and the plays that were performed prior to 1800. The author’s principal theoretical framework owes a great deal to the work of Jürgen Habermas, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It allows the author to link the press to international theories of the public sphere. Yet because he ignores the now-very-extensive critique of this paradigm, Eamon undertheorizes issues of gender, class, and race, which may have disturbed his conception of a unified British public. Eamon also relies on postmodern notions of the production of knowledge as a system of power, but he loses sight of this approach in the body of the work, which remains resolutely devoted to a more straightforward recording of the emergence of Enlightenment-informed ideas. This tends to inhibit the author from interrogating a variety of concepts including the public sphere, Britishness/ Englishness, genteel civility, and the scientific ideal itself.

Further, despite the author’s insistence that “all print was political” (xvi), he at no time defines what he means by political. Eamon seems strangely oblivious to the fact that, beneath the rhetoric of rational debate, the newspapers of Halifax and Quebec closely resembled their counterparts in the thirteen colonies, functioning as primary vehicles for both out-of-doors oppositional politics and espousing civic humanist or classical republican ideas. The complete absence of analysis of the kind of political discourse that was ubiquitous in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic calls into question Eamon’s broader claim that there was an absence of republican ideas in these colonial newspapers. One only has to examine the opening years of the Quebec Gazetteto find clear references to the tropes of classical republicanism when issues such as the Stamp Act and the quartering of troops were discussed. This neglect of a broader culturalist notion of politics also leads Eamon to ignore the importance of constitutional liberty as the cornerstone of contemporary ideas of Britishness, a concept that is largely assumed rather than analyzed in this work. If Britishness in the metropolis was being drastically reinterpreted under the stresses of revolution, as Kathleen Wilson and Dror Wahrman have argued, surely this same process would...