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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 by Joseph M. Adelman Nora Slonimsky Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789. By Joseph M. Adelman. Studies in Early American Economy and Society. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 255. $54.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2860-4.) In a review published in the American Historical Review, David Paul Nord describes Jeffrey L. Pasley's "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001) as a "historiographical sunrise." This is in no small part, Nord argues, because Pasley situates news in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as "vital" in the larger history of journalism, particularly seen in Pasley's examination of political parties as "communication network[s]" (American Historical Review, 108 [February 2003], p. 191). It is perhaps unusual to begin a review of one book with a quotation from another review. But eighteen years after Pasley's groundbreaking work, Joseph M. Adelman has produced another historiographical sunrise, this time on the subject of networks themselves. Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 is based on the premise that "the connections that printers had begun to develop as part of their trade proved not just indispensable but in fact necessary and vital to the Patriot cause" (p. 3). Beginning his study on the eve of the imperial crisis of 1763, Adelman explains how loose ties among different printers gradually became a formalized and intricate network through creative and physical work. As attempts to regulate the press became more fraught in the 1760s, protests against the Stamp Act (1765) were led by printers, who described the act as hostile to both freedom of expression and the colonies more generally. This instance provided a model for subsequent protest, particularly in how printers "amplified" political agendas using their networks (p. 15). Military conflict, however, provided challenges for printers' commercial enterprises and, as a result, for their ability to engage with the cultivation of public opinion. Both during the war and in the 1780s, while printers struggled to regain financial solvency, they also continued those pre-Revolution networks, which reinforced national and ultimately federal visions of an independent United States. For twenty-first-century readers, networks are enmeshed in everyday conversations, particularly when those conversations involve absorbing the news of the day. Be they social, digital, abstract, or face-to-face, networks are critical to understanding the relationship between information and politics. Exploring this dynamic in the late eighteenth century, Revolutionary Networks puts political and commercial history firmly in conversation with the history of the book and with digital humanities. If "The Tyranny of Printers" expertly centers [End Page 685] partisan politics in the world of printing, Revolutionary Networks unpacks the very notion of a center. Exploring networks as both conceptual and material constructs, Revolutionary Networks grounds how information is communicated and shared in the tangible technological processes and physical labors of the print trade. Benedict Anderson's ideas of "imagined community" and "print capitalism," Adelman shows, are made real by the editing choices printers made across the North American colonies, and, in turn, those choices relied on and formed connections in order to share and circulate patriotic or loyalist content (pp. 14, 13). In Adelman's astute discussion of how networks came together and how they were built, funded, and navigated, Revolutionary Networks makes a foundational contribution to growing studies of media, infrastructure, and the role of information in political engagement. Adelman does this in two distinct ways. First, by emphasizing the material and intellectual labors and commercial actions that printers undertook, Adelman demonstrates how rhetoric became increasingly and tangibly influential. This bridging of the technological components of the print trade with the political messaging also renders Revolutionary Networks a valuable text for teaching. Second, in its integration of digital tools, Revolutionary Networks provides a compelling model for truly interdisciplinary research methods and interpretations. Adelman has created a database of master printers who worked during the chronological scope of Revolutionary Networks, which is visualized in charts and graphs throughout the book and elaborated on in an essay on sources. While...