How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire, by Sterling Joseph Coleman, Jr.

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire by Sterling Joseph Coleman, Jr Barbara Black (bio) How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire, by Sterling Joseph Coleman, Jr.; pp. 200. New York and London: Routledge, 2020, $136.00, $39.16 paper, $39.16 ebook. In How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire, Sterling Joseph Coleman, Jr. examines the institutional histories of three colonial subscription libraries: the Penang, the General Library of the Institute of Jamaica, and the Lagos Library. This selection of sites permits the book a globalized range by focusing on three colonies: Malaysia (to represent more broadly the British presence in Asia), Jamaica (the Caribbean), and Nigeria (Africa). The temporal parameters of Coleman’s study take the reader back to the nineteenth century to recount the founding of these institutions; of seemingly greater interest to this book, however, are the postcolonial lives and legacies of these libraries during the first third of the twentieth century. For each of his case studies, Coleman is particularly interested in the post-World War II 1940s, a decade of deepening nationalisms and fights for independence. What happened, he inquires, in and to these institutional vestiges of colonial life as the politics of modernity unfolded and decolonization advanced? [End Page 711] The book begins with three chapters of context and background. The first explains the contours of the colonial British book trade, necessary information for understanding the importance of books and the value of literacy in the colonial public sphere. Books were a marker of wealth, and the need for subscription libraries in the British colonies was urgent and essential. Serving as a vital educational tool, books also helped to stave off what Jeffrey Auerbach has called “imperial boredom,” bringing the metropole to the colony in effect, and they aided in underscoring class stratifications and instrumental national/cultural differences (21). The second chapter informs the reader about the role of clubs in colonial life. Here Coleman defines what he sees as an important term to his argument, “clubbability” (18). Access to books, he explains, is entangled with the core criteria of clubbability, which he sums up as “wealth, ability, and Westernization” (24). The third chapter outlines certain global geopolitical crises that contribute important texture to claims Coleman will make about the social work of colonial and postcolonial libraries. A different structure for the book might have been preferable, with the third chapter more generatively integrated into (or, alternately, coming after) the later library chapters and the second chapter less consigned to a seemingly quarantined space of its own. The greatest cost of having these three contextualizing chapters upfront is that the book’s primary work, which is to bring such institutions as the Penang Library to life, is delayed. Chapter 4 featuring the Penang is, for this reviewer, the strongest material of the book. Coleman argues that the Penang Library, founded in 1817, operated much as the hill stations did in British-Asian life. Here the book’s various argumentative moves and archival practices converge most productively. The strength of Coleman’s methodologies lies in his quarrying of annual reports, statistics, by-laws and policies, handbooks, parliamentary debates, acquisition and catalog records, and census numbers. Arriving at this material sooner might have allowed for more room to explore the continuities as well as the differences among the three libraries studied. The chapter on the Lagos Library is briefer than the others, though race plays a salient role in this institution’s evolving social work; this new emphasis offers intriguing territory worthy of more sustained consideration. Coleman’s examination of the Penang most aligns with the promise of the book’s title, which seemed not to suit the book in its entirety. Working as a library historian, Coleman examines the kind of sociability that libraries foster, which is quite distinct from the associational culture of clubland. The mission of libraries is characterized by robust community outreach; their cultural work is far less concerned with the dynamics of selection, inclusion, and exclusion that inform clubbable sociality. As Coleman points out, the Penang’s membership, as well...