Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 by Joseph M. Adelman (review)

Newspapers accounted for nearly 80 percent of all late colonial imprints in America (4). In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman offers a fascinating view of the printers behind these pages and an in-depth study of the role that they played in the development of the American Revolution. Adelman opens this view to readers by introducing Isaiah Thomas, a printer, philanthropist, collector, and antiquarian, who in 1810 published The History of Printing in America. As Adelman states, this book was the first of many works to discuss the significant influence that the printing press had on the American Revolution. In it, Thomas offers his views not only as a historian but also as a printer who lived through the Revolution. Adelman uses Thomas's work to introduce readers to the central argument of the book: "that printers played a crucial role in the formation and shaping of political rhetoric during the American Revolution" (3).

Revolutionary Networks joins the prolific scholarship that has been dedicated to the exploration of the newspapers in the modern printing world. For example, in his recent book, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself, historian Andrew Pettegree argues that a new generation of newspapers and political journals that developed in eighteenth-century Europe and North America extended the range of political commentary and reflection among the reading public. "For the first time," he writes, "newspapers played a vital role not only in recording but in shaping political events."¹ Since the 1980s, several studies have analyzed the role that periodicals played in revolutionary United States.² Yet these studies focus mostly on the printed texts, their circulation, and their reception among the public, and they only tangentially look into the crucial role that printers, as producers of texts and social actors, played in configuring networks of information and in shaping public opinion. By bridging recent contributions of the history of networks in the Atlantic world with the history of the printing press during the revolutionary era, Adelman's book connects printed texts to their creative origins and the extremely complex process of production and distribution. His study offers a comprehensive analysis of how the production skills, economic interests, commercial networks, and individual opinions of American printers shaped the content of political debates, "helped to produce coordinated resistance to imperial politics, and began to develop a national communication infrastructure" (13).

Throughout six rich and elegantly written chapters, Adelman chronologically explores how American printers navigated a difficult world first moved by local resistance to unexpected imperial regulations, then deeply shaken by protest and war, and finally transformed by the new political and economic challenges of the nascent nation. During these revolutionary times, printers participated in a fragile act of balancing their political opinions and their commercial interests. Adelman avoids simplistic dichotomies between loyalist and patriotic printers and instead explains the various dilemmas printers faced as political conflict developed from 1763 until 1789. During the Stamp Act Crisis, for example, some printers chose to publish their newspapers with stamps and pay the duty while others ceased publication or published anonymously and yet others published openly without stamps. "Each [decision] carried financial risks," explains Adelman, "so many printers vacillated among several options at different points during the crisis" (59).

Drawing on a thick description of the printers' social world, Adelman demonstrates how crucial family, community, and political networks were for the continuity of the printing businesses during these transformative years. Printers needed to be connected to information networks to find reliable and consistent sources of news and also effective circuits to successfully distribute their printed products. They also needed to be part of local and Atlantic commercial webs that could provide them with the needed supplies and equipment to print and financial networks that could give them access to credit to help them develop...