Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

This book assesses the contribution of the business press and the publication of newspapers to the economic transformation of England in the long eighteenth century. A pivotal change in the book trades, apparent from the late 17th century, was the increased separation of printers from bookseller-publishers, from the skilled artisan to the bookseller-financier who might have no prior training in the printing house but who took up the sale of publications as another commodity. This book examines the broader social relationship between publication and the practical conduct of trade. The age of Enlightenment was an age of commercial and financial transformation offering printers and the business press new market opportunities. Print helped to effect a business revolution. It also changed attitudes and behaviours. Many more people encountered newspapers, business press products or jobbing print than the glamorous books of the Enlightenment. Their wide-ranging outputs had huge implications for the way lives were managed, regulated and recorded.