Introduction: The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Local and Transnational Contexts

Abstract

This volume explores the history, roles and functioning of the foreign political press in London in the long nineteenth century, from a political, social, cultural and editorial perspective. Bringing together contributions by political and cultural historians and literary studies specialists, it builds on research into exile and transnational political activism conducted in the last twenty years or so, in which the press and print activism always feature as key themes but without a detailed analysis of their role in daily life and politics, nor with a comparative focus. Tellingly, the comprehensive Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (2009) does not include a specific entry on press history. Neither have historians of the British press examined in depth the extraterritorial political press, aside from colonial and imperial contexts, which have received much attention. It would certainly be unfair to claim that the transnational turn has bypassed press history, as evidenced for instance by some comparative studies, sections on globalization and transnational exchanges in Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2017) and the forthcoming (2018) Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, 1800–1900 respectively, and the work conducted in recent years by the Transnational network for the study of foreign-language press, Transfopress, as well as networks with a wider remit, such as the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit). The Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals covers foreign titles extensively, while the editors of the 2016 Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth Century Periodicals and Newspapers ‘interpret “Britain” … as an extendable conceptual, geographic, and political space that often overlaps with locations of other social groupings not just of nations but of reading communities’, and the Handbook includes a stimulating section on the ‘Geographies’ of newspapers and periodicals.13 More specifically, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism acknowledges the significant contribution to the British political press of prominent European radicals such as Karl Marx, Giuseppe Mazzini, Louis Kossuth and Peter Kropotkin. Growing awareness of the cross-border dimensions of media history has led to a recent call to reframe predominantly national histories of media and communication in a transnational perspective.