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“In this smart, wide-ranging study of texts on the move, the global history of the book becomes a counter-history of the nation. Rather than pitting one against the other, contributors show how entangled these spheres are - and how key print culture is to illuminating points of convergence and divergence. Moving skillfully between dog-eared volumes and the booksellers, readers and marketplaces that made them, this collection brims with insights about the lives of books and their role not simply in reflecting global relations but in creating them -- with every turn of the page.” - Antoinette M. Burton, Professor of History, University of Illinois, USA, and co-author with Isabel Hofmeyr of Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire. This collection is an edited volume of essays that showcases how books played a crucial role in making and materialising histories of travel, scientific exchanges, translation, and global markets from the late-eighteenth century to the present. While existing book historical practice is overly dependent on models of the local and the national, we suggest that approaching the book as a cross-region, travelling - and therefore global- object offers new approaches and methodologies for a study in global perspective. By thus studying the book in its transnational and inter-imperial, textual, inter-textual and material dimensions, this collection will highlight its key role in making possible a global imagination, shaped by networks of print material, readers, publishers and translators Chapter 1. Introduction -- SECTION ONE: COLONIAL NETWORKS -- Chapter 2. London’s Geographic Knowledge Network and the Anson Account (1748) - Katherine Parker -- Chapter 3. The Other Empire: Australian Books and American Publishers in the late nineteenth century- David Carter -- Chapter 4. Reading by Chance in a World of Wandering Texts - Alexander Bubb -- SECTION TWO: GLOBAL GENRES -- Chapter 5. ‘Read! Learn!’: Globalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing - Gail Low -- Chapter 6. Governing by the Book: Mediterranean Travel and Sanitary Prophylaxis in the Nineteenth-Century - Riccardo Liberatore -- Chapter 7. The Circle of Knowledge: Radical Commensurability and the Deaf Textbook - Hansun Hsiung -- SECTION THREE: READING RELATIONSHIPS -- Chapter 8. ‘Bringing Spring to Sahbai’s Rose-Garden’: Persian Printing in North India after 1857 - Zahra Shah -- Chapter 9. Reading The Discovery of India in the Library of an Australian Prime Minister - Sybil Nolan -- SECTION FOUR: CULTURAL TRANSLATION -- Chapter 10. Bustānī’s Iliad and Imperialism in the Middle East - Evelyn Richardson -- Chapter 11. ‘The Narcissism of Small Differences’: Plagiarism in South African Letters - Kate Highman -- Chapter 12. The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic - Ben Holgate -- Afterword - Elleke Boehmer --
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