Transnational Exchanges

Abstract

Based upon an interwoven series of international case studies, this chapter addresses how technological, economic, and social changes affected the gathering and distribution of news across the nineteenth-century world. It focuses particularly on commercial and epistolary relationships between Anglophone cultures, and how the exchange of printed materials, and the development of transnational press organisations and communication technologies such as mail steamers and the telegraph shaped interactions between individual newspapers as well as between their far-flung readerships. It explores how texts were transformed as they moved from region to region, despite remaining in the same language. It also covers the role of empire in supporting the growth of professional journalism, and the connection between migration and the evolution of a transoceanic print culture that united home and ex patriot communities. Finally, it offers insights into the role of translation and foreign correspondents in British-Continental networks, including the means and effects of translation on both literary and news content within the newspaper press. Overall, it argues for threads of consistency in style and approach throughout a period of immense social, political, and technological change.