The Caribbean’s early newspaper press remains curiously absent from histories of colonial print, despite the region’s centrality to imperial expansion. This project addresses this gap by turning to newspapers printed across British, Dutch, French, Spanish and Scandinavian colonies between the 1760s and 1820s—a moment of intense imperial competition and linguistic flux. With vast archives newly digitized, now is the moment to explore this material systematically, in many cases for the first time.
While scholarship has mined these papers for historical information about colonial life, this project treats them instead as material technologies that constructed imperial authority and mediated the region's shifting linguistic and political nature. Adopting a multi-lingual, transimperial and bibliographical lens, it studies these presses in tandem rather than within isolated national traditions.
This project (1) reconstructs the transimperial networks of printers and presses; (2) investigates how newspapers registered shifting colonial borders through their book historical features—e.g. illustrations, colophons, mastheads, lay-out—and (3) how these, in turn, enacted or unsettled imperial power.
This project hypothesizes that the newspaper’s flexible, heterogeneous form mirrored and negotiated the moveable borders of empire. In doing so, it reframes the 18th-century Caribbean as a key site for theorizing the relationship between print, translation and early configurations of Empire.