The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance eds. by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (review)

Decades of work have gone into dissecting the importance of periodicals and newspapers in the United Kingdom and, increasingly, its empire, and still many avenues of scholarship are yet to be undertaken. As the editors of this volume point out, resources that have been digitized "remain overwhelmingly biased towards English-language publications" while scholarship in the long nineteenth century "retains a mostly national focus" (2). To address this gap, Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva have assembled a collection that examines what will likely be a new area of periodical study for many VPR readers: political periodicals created by exilic and immigrant communities based in London. While it is a condition of the study of print culture that there will always be more investigation to be done, the strides made in the study of periodicals, as they relate to issues like imperial and transnational networks, gender, race, and class, to name a few examples, prove that there is always a capacity to revisit, complicate, and expand our understanding of an already very full, very complex field. The most exciting aspect of The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance is that in pursuing the "link between personal mobility … and the circulation of political ideas," the editors provide us with yet another lens through which to view nineteenth-century print culture (2).

The editors have chosen to cover an expansive period from the start of the nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. Nineteenth-century scholars will no doubt appreciate the context this range offers, particularly as the book encompasses such a variety of socio-political circumstances. Furthermore, the chronology, selection of exilic communities, and introduction help to create a narrative across the nine chapters. The writings of political exile begin with the waning of older European empires and the rise of new nations in Latin America. In the first chapter, Karen Racine offers a usefully broad look at Spanish-American publications in early nineteenth-century London. This is followed by Daniel Muñoz Sempere's examination of the rise of Hispanic Liberalism in exilic papers from 1810 to 1841. The collection then progresses through the dissolution of monarchies and the rise of new republics. For example, Daniel Alves and Paulo Jorge Fernandes carefully explicate the complex ideological conflicts among different groups of Portuguese political exiles. Thomas C. Jones and Constance Bantman provide a very useful overview of French publications in London over the course of fifty years, from 1848 to 1905. We see the emergence of increasingly radical politics while moving through chapters about writers in exile from Italy, Germany, and Russia. And in the last chapter, Ole Birk Laursen focuses on Indian political papers published in Britain, positioning the stages of "nationalist organization, parliamentary agitation and violent resistance" in a far more trans-national, cosmopolitan tradition of radicalism than anti-imperial works published in India could (188). This final chapter drives home a key point of the collection: these writers and publishers were part of the periodical landscape within England, not just nebulous voices from abroad. The arrangement of these chapters stresses not only increased radicalism as the nineteenth century wore on but also a commitment to the liberal exchange of ideas in London—a city that welcomed refugees and provided an opportunity to produce works that created a shared discourse within far-flung political communities.

Some key themes emerge throughout the collection. On the whole, the chapters all demonstrate how London's free press helped disseminate radical political discourse and how periodicals intervened in the development of liberal revolutions, anti-authoritarian causes, and attempts to agitate for a new social order. Abbreviated runs and troubles with funding were often the order of the day, but each community seems...