The Literary Marketplace of British India: 1780–1844

Abstract

This chapter discusses the material conditions for the emergence of a publishing and print culture in early British India and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It explores the demographic and economic factors affecting the development of the publishing industry. It argues that newspapers and literary titles were not simply a conduit for the distribution of the news and culture of ‘home’ across India, but also provided a forum in which the British community in India could write for (and often about) itself, thus enabling the development of a sense of local and colonial identity, related to but also set apart from the identity of the British at ‘home’.