Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals

David Finkelstein is a cultural historian who has published in areas related to print, labour and press history. Recent publications include Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (2018), and the edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900 (2020), winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its contribution to the promotion of Victorian press studies. David Johnson is Professor of Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation (2012) and Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature between Critique and Utopia (2019); and the co-editor of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2008); The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015); and Labour Struggles in Southern Africa (2023). He is the General Editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Key Texts in Anti-Colonial Thought. Caroline Davis is Associate Professor in Publishing in the Department of Information Studies at University College London. Caroline is the author of Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (2013) and African Literature and the CIA (2020); the editor of Print Cultures: A Reader in Theory and Practice (2019); and the co-editor of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015).

• Introduction: British colonial periodicals in context, David Finkelstein and David Johnson Section A: Creating and contesting the colonial public sphere 1. Authorship and collective self-fashioning in Pre-Confederation English Canada, Cynthia Sugars and Paul Keen2. Early colonial periodicals in nineteenth-century Canada: The Literary Garland in context, Fariha Shaikh3. The Afro-Caribbean press and the politics of place in Jamaica and Barbados: The Watchman and Jamaica Free Press and The Liberal, Candace Ward4. Mofussil versus metropolis, subalterns versus seniors: the rise and demise of The Meerut Universal Magazine, Graham Shaw5. Writing the ‘Wooden World’: periodicals and settler environmental knowledge in colonial New Zealand, Philip Steer6. British missionary magazines at home and abroad: Southern Africa as topic and Southern Africans as readership, Lize Kriel, Annika Vosseler and Chantelle Finaughty7. The Sydney Bulletin and the settler colonial subject, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth8. Periodicals and Australian Federation, Sam Hutchinson9. The South African News and the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, Jonathan Derrick10. The West Africa Weekly: commerce, empire and decolonisation, Jonathan DerrickSection B: Women and colonial periodicals 11. Transnational reprinting and the colonial women’s magazine: The Montreal Museum, 1832–34, Honor Rieley12. The birth of the Australian women’s magazine: The New Idea, 1902–1911, Michelle J. Smith13. Women’s writing and reporting on women in the Ghanaian and Nigerian Press, ca. 1880–1930s, Katharina Oke14. Indian women’s pre-independence periodicals in English: The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, Stri-Dharma, and the Indian New Woman, Deborah A. Logan15. Marriage Hygiene and the internationalisation of eugenical sexology in the 1930s, Tanya Agathocleous, Ruwanthi Edirisinghe, Jessica Lu, Jaïra Placide and Sarah SchwartzSection C: Language in colonial periodicals 16. Making Māori citizens in colonial New Zealand: the role of government niupepa, Lachy Paterson17. Language and the making of the colonial modern: periodicals from late nineteenth-century Kerala, India, G. Arunima18. Simple Letters?: British and Pacific literacies in the Victorian missionary periodical, Michelle Elleray19. Interrogating the imperial factor and convoking black South Africa: the Cape African Newspaper Izwi Labantu, 1897–1909, Janet Remmington20. Colonial government periodicals in 1920s East Africa: Mambo Leo and Habari, Emma Hunter21. Print networks and linguistic interaction in the early Yoruba press, Karin Barber22. Colonial entanglements: Black South African periodicals and the colonial printsphere, 1920s–30s, Corinne Sandwith and Athambile MasolaSection D: Trans-colonial connections in colonial periodicals 23. Melodee Wood, Samuel Revans and Company: colonial commercial trade newspapers in the age of Responsible Government 24. Colonial trade identity and labour information exchange in the international typographical trade press, 1840–1910, David Finkelstein 25. The Anglo-Zulu War in the Friend of India: mediation, meaning and authority, Andrew Griffiths26. British anarchism and the colonial question: the case of Freedom, 1918–1962, Ole Birk Laursen27. The Atlantic Charter in British colonial periodicals, David Johnson28. Citation and solidarity: reporting the 1955 Asian-African Conference in African newspapers and periodicals, Christopher J. Lee 29. Non-alignment and Maoist China: Eastern Horizon in the era of decolonisation, 1960–1981, Alex Tickell and Anne WetheriltSection E: Anti-colonialism in the colonial and postcolonial public sphere 30. For illustrative purposes: Nana Sahib, Jotee Prasad, and representation in British and Anglo-Indian newspapers, Priti Joshi 31. The Indian Newspaper Reports of British India: ‘A Kind of Periodical Press’, Sukeshi Kamra32. The anticolonial periodical between public and counterpublic: Beacon and Public Opinion in the interwar years, Raphael Dalleo 33. ‘Not a Newspaper in the Ordinary Sense of the Term:’ the geopolitics of the newspaper/magazine divide in the Nigerian Comet, Marina Bilbija34. Africa in Jamaica: W. A. Domingo, George Padmore, and Public Opinion, Myles Osborne35. Citizenship, responsibility and literary culture in the university periodical in Eastern Africa: spaces of social production in Busara and its networks, Madhu Krishnan

The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals is a refreshing, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched collection. Its thirty-five essays explore multiple facets of a colonial public sphere that was richly shaped by journalists, technological advancements, and political, linguistic, and imperial agendas. The editors showcase an impressive range of new research, including contributions that unearth lesser-known figures and periodicals. For researchers and scholars of the British colonial press and periodicals, this will prove to be a work with immense critical depth and potential, widening existing banks of knowledge and pointing new directions for inquiry.