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342 Chapter  What Difference Does Colonialism Make? Reassessing Print and Social Change in an Age of Global Imperialism Tony Ballantyne The relationship between print and colonialism has become increasingly important in scholarship over the past two decades, not just because of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s bold argument about the revolutionary impact of the printing press on “Western Civilization” and the flowering of the “history of the book” in European history but also as a result of several historiographical shifts in the study of empires and colonialism. “Print culture ” has emerged as a significant analytical concern for a small but significant group of historians whose research focuses on the history of communication within and between empires; this concept has also moved to the heart of recent studies of the intellectual and literary history of colonial cultures, especially in South Asia. Such work is a significant part of a larger series of debates over the sources, nature, and impact of European empire-building stimulated by Edward Said’s Orientalism; the impact of the Subaltern Studies collective, which radically recast understandings of the history of colonial and postcolonial South Asia; and the rise of the “new imperial history,” which drew on literary studies and anthropology as it foregrounded the centrality of cultural difference in shaping both colonial encounters and imperial culture. . C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002); and the essays collected in Modern Asian Studies 27.1 (1993). Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited,” in AHR Forum, “How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical Review 107.1 (2002): 88, and “On Revolution and the Printed Word,” in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 186–206. . Anindita Ghosh, “An Uncertain ‘Coming of the Book’: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India,” Book History 6 (2003): 23–55; Priya Joshi, “Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India,” Book History 1 (1998): 196–220. What Difference Does Colonialism Make? 343 Even though this “cultural turn” has been strongly resisted by some historians wedded to older economistic Marxist traditions of analysis and rejected by imperial historians skeptical of postcolonial theory, there is no doubt that a new vision of colonialism as a cultural project has crystallized. “Knowledge” has emerged as a key problematic for historians of empire, and much recent work has focused on the construction of colonial knowledge and the role of knowledge production in the creation and projection of colonial authority. Because printing was central to the working of modern colonial states, and because it stands at the junction of several key fields of historical analysis—the history of technology, economic history, religious and intellectual history, and the history of the modern state itself—it has become an important point of debate in the scholarship on modern empire building. Where Elizabeth Eisenstein’s substantial body of research has been concerned with the rise of the printing press and an attendant “print culture” that transformed “Western Civilization,” this essay moves beyond early modern Europe to offer a thumbnail sketch of the place of print in an age of rapid empire-building, where the printing press (and its agents) became a crucial instrument for colonial administrators, missionaries, and social reformers, indigenous leaders and pioneering nationalists, and the members of international scientific, humanitarian, and political communities. From the 1760s, which witnessed a new imperial thrust by Britain as its Atlantic empire was plunged into crisis and its ongoing conflict with France became a global war, print culture was crucial in shaping the cultural projects of colonialism in the vast parts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific newly opened to tentacles of European imperialism—both formal and informal. European print culture, the product of the “long revolution” surveyed in Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (PPAC), was not simply exported to these societies but was contested and reworked in each colonial context, assuming a specific position in the various forms of colonial modernity that emerged during the long nineteenth century. By examining the impact of print in the lands incorporated into the British Empire from the mid eighteenth century, the main body of this essay maps the role of...

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