The impact of printing was evident not only in the philosophy of the seventeenth century but also in the rise of parliament. It contributed to the efficient conduct of business in the parliamentary system.[265] Law escaped the influence of the concept of nature which had been significant in the rise of science. There was ‘nothing more repellent to Anglo-Saxon instinct than the corruption of law by political ideology’.[266] The imprecise character of the English language which followed its exposure to continental influence in French and Latin was not adapted to the precision of codes.
Sir Edward Coke regarded the common law as the fundamental law of the realm and the embodiment of reason which parliament could not change. ‘When an act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will controul it, and adjudge such act to be void’ (Bonham case, 1610). But parliament, in opposition to the absolute demands of the monarchy, claimed and exercised a sovereign power. A theory of might was substituted for a theory of law. ‘Common law is living and human, statutes have neither humanity nor humour.’[267] Hobbes developed the theory of sovereignty which completely subordinated the Church to the civil power which had begun with Marsilius of Padua and laid the basis for the conflict between sovereignty in the colonies and sovereignty in Great Britain which broke the British Empire.[268] The Instrument of Government which set up the Protectorate in 1653 was the first and last attempt to limit the power of parliament by a written constitution. The Revolution in 1689 established the legal supremacy of parliament, but written constitutions with limitations on legislatures persisted in the colonies with the belief in fundamental law.
The supremacy of parliament was strengthened by the new financial devices which spread from Antwerp and Amsterdam to London and which accompanied improvements in communication incidental to the growth of newspapers. The concept of municipal credit had spread from Italian cities.[269] The Republic of the United Netherlands was the first to use state credit as an effective weapon in the war of independence. Amsterdam as the successor to Antwerp developed an exchange concerned with stock rather than government securities. The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602 as the first of the large corporations, was followed by the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609. Dutch trade expanded in relation to Asia after the annexation of Portugal by Spain in 1580 and in relation to Europe during the Thirty Years War (1618-48). The Amsterdam exchange facilitated the building of an effective coalition against Louis XIV. In England the state followed the Dutch pattern in assuming the form of a corporation whose members were responsible for its engagements by which large funded loans were floated at a low rate of interest. The revolution of 1689 was followed by the creation of public debt. The funding system was introduced in 1693, the Bank of England in 1694, and Exchequer Bills in 1696. Supremacy of parliament enabled England to introduce the great fundamental principle of public debt. Efficient use of reserves for paper currency enabled England to meet the drain of specie to India and extend her trade. The concept of possession in common law in contrast with the concept of absolute ownership in Roman law facilitated the growth of trade.[270] ‘Toleration was the necessary outcome of the new finance as it was of the new political system.’[271] ‘Trade is most vigorously carried on, in every state and government, by the heterodox part of the same, and such as profess opinions different from what are publickly established.’[272] In England ‘neither an absolute king nor an absolute church would ever again impede economic progress’.[273]
With the expansion of paper production in England following the establishment of paper factories by Huguenot immigrants and the accession of William and Mary, restrictions on printing were relaxed. John Locke[274] pointed to the enormous advantages of freedom of printing to Holland and to the serious losses attending the monopoly of the Stationers' Company in England, and in 1695 the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse—a step which, according to Macaulay, did ‘more for liberty and for civilization than the great charter or the Bill of Rights’.
Advance in Holland and England was paralleled by decline in France and Germany. The outbreak of savage religious warfare from 1618 to 1648 left Germany a number of despotic principalities in which princes determined the religion of their subjects. Rapid improvement in communication destroyed conventions even in warfare, and religion accentuated savagery.[275] After 1648 the influence of Grotius, who had returned to the concept of natural law in discussing relations between sovereign states, became more powerful and the balance of power became a definite consideration. Louis XIV attempted to crush the republican press of Holland in the war of 1672 and expelled the Huguenots in 1685. The Gallican Church, secure in its supremacy, displayed the worst attributes of the state Church. Centralization dried up the stream of national life. French finance collapsed in 1648, but the disappearance of Italian financiers had not been accompanied by the development of an effective exchange. After the death of Colbert in 1683 the budget was disorganized. But under Louis XIV the growth of efficient administration gave government comprehensiveness, decision, and consistency. ‘The government of Louis XIV appeared to be the first that was engaged solely in managing its affairs like a power at once definitive and progressive, which was not afraid of making innovations because it reckoned upon the future.’[276] But by 1712 monarchy was worn out as much as Louis XIV.
In the eighteenth century French industry and trade became increasingly exposed to the effects of suppression. The French paper industry was influenced in a belated and slight fashion by improvements such as the use of cylinders and of wooden glazing rolls (about 1720) developed by the Dutch. Attempts to compete with the Dutch product were evident in detailed regulations of production and restrictions and embargoes on exports of rags. Difficulties of the French industry were evident in family control and the emergence of organized labour[277] intent on improved working conditions. Expansion of the Dutch trade had been accompanied by increased domestic and export markets and increasing imports of rags as raw material. In England paper production was given encouragement by protection and expanded throughout the century. Large quantities of rags were imported from the Continent. The pronounced movement toward self-sufficiency created an acute problem in raw materials by the end of the century.
The end of the Licensing Act in 1695 was followed by a large number of publications and the appearance of the first daily sheet in 1701. The limitations of the hand press in which 2,000 sheets could be printed by relays of press men on one side in eight hours checked the circulation of single newspapers, led to the appearance of a large number of small papers,[278] and favoured other media in which time was a less important consideration.[279] The limitations of newspapers accentuated the importance of pamphlets as weapons of party warfare[280] and assumed the enlistment of effective writers such as Swift, Defoe, Addison, and Steele. Of Harley, Swift wrote, ‘no other man of affairs has ever made such use of a man of letters’. The imposition of stamp taxes in 1712 restricted expansion and facilitated control of the press after the accession of Walpole to power. Taxes were increased in 1725 and the printing of parliamentary debates prohibited in 1738. With these restrictions printers concentrated on weeklies and in turn on summaries provided by monthlies such as the Gentleman's Magazine, started in 1731. With the support of a Copyright Act, effective 1 April 1710, printers undertook compendious works and rapidly became publishers largely concerned with markets rather than craftsmanship. In the period prior to the growth of literacy publishers employed armies of scribblers in abridging, compiling, writing notes, and using scissors and paste. Ephraim Chambers's Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences was published by subscriptions in 1728. By the end of Walpole's administration publishers had developed more varied publications. In 1740 Richardson's Pamela was published and was followed by other novels. The circulating library widened the market for new types of literature. In 1744 John Newberry began the publication of illustrated children's books.[281]
Destruction of the monopoly position of publishers by
a legal decision in 1774, which denied the right to perpetual copyright under common law, was followed by publication of cheap reprints by small booksellers. Large publishers turned to large and expensive publications such as those of Robertson, Adam Smith, and Gibbon. Scottish writers had not been hampered by the long period of drudgery which had characterized English writing and had been supported directly by the universities. A Roman law tradition fostered an interest in philosophical speculation reflected in Adam Smith and Hume. The Encyclopædia Britannica, published in Edinburgh in 1771, was dependent on scholarly writing. Scottish printers and booksellers participated in the expansion of the market after 1774. Constable began the notable publishing venture with which Scott was associated. Constable, ‘perhaps, the greatest publisher in the history of English letters’, ‘first broke in upon the monopoly of the London trade, and made letters what they now are’.[282] Scott superseded the ‘pursuit of old black letter literature’.[283] The Edinburgh Review was begun in 1802. English writers were rescued from hackwork, and Johnson and Goldsmith, following Pope, established the profession of authorship.[284]
In the second half of the century newspapers gained in importance through the demand for news of wars and through the support of advertising, especially after restrictions were imposed on sign posters. After 1774, following the efforts of Junius and Wilkes, the right of publishing parliamentary debates was established. Improvement in communications widened the market for the daily press. But the significance of more severe restrictions in stamp and advertisement taxes, and threats of libel suits, was evident in the enormous sale of pamphlets. Popular literature[285] became enormously important after 1790. Women writers occupied a prominent place. By the turn of the century romantic literature had struck its roots in English reading. The essay created in the eighteenth century hardly survived it.[286] The emphasis on reason and nature had been changed through the influence of Hume to an emphasis on nature and feeling. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (Hume). ‘Everyone believed in immortality until they heard Boyle give a lecture to prove it.’ Destruction of reason and natural law, political restrictions, the weakening of deism, and the rusty ecclesiastical machinery provided the background for the growth of Methodism under the direction of Whitefield and Wesley. Discontent was driven from the political to the religious channel.
Developments in Great Britain had profound implications for the colonies. Restriction of the press[287] was paralleled, but the expansion of literary activity in Great Britain, which had served as an outlet to political repression, overwhelmed the colonies[288] and compelled concentration on newspapers. Books were imported from Holland and England. The dominance of the printer in relation to the publication of laws of the assemblies and the post office led to the development of newspapers[289] largely dependent on the writings in English newspapers. The controversies of the English press prior to their control by Walpole were reprinted in the colonies.[290] The agitation against restrictions was carried out with more success than in Great Britain, in part by revolutionary spirits who had emigrated to avoid repression. Peter Zenger, tried for sedition, was acquitted by a jury in 1735. The concern of the printer in governmental patronage involved constant agitation and the large number of colonies defeated attempts at uniform supervision. Printers such as Benjamin Franklin could migrate from one colony to another. The attempt of Great Britain to impose the stamp tax in 1765 touched American public opinion at its source and was followed by determined resistance. ‘Printers, when uninfluenced by government, have generally arrayed themselves on the side of liberty, nor are they less remarkable for attention to the profits of their profession. A stamp duty which openly invaded the first, and threatened a great diminution of the last, provoked their united zealous opposition.’[291] In the period preceding the outbreak of the Revolution paper production had increased on a substantial scale and the colonies were able to produce their own presses and type. With the importance of advertising the newspaper became ‘part of the machinery of economic distribution’. The power of the newspaper was reflected in the success of the Revolution[292] and in the adoption of the Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of the press.
After the Revolution newspapers were more closely attached to political parties and concerned with influencing public opinion. The resulting bitterness led Fenno to write in 1799: ‘The American newspapers are the most base, false, servile, and venal publications that ever polluted the fountains of writing—their editors the most ignorant, mercenary and vulgar automatons that ever were moved by the continually rusty wires of sordid mercantile avarice.’[293] Attempts at repression led to the defeat of John Adams and the Federalist party. ‘The printers can never leave us in a state of perfect rest and union of opinion’ (Jefferson). The empire was broken in part through the distorted effects of the uneven development of printing which reinforced division incidental to the legal supremacy of parliament based on force and the persistence of an element of Roman law. Inability to adapt English institutions to new circumstances lost the colonies in the Western hemisphere and imperilled the empire in the East. Theory was unable to mediate between absolute dependence and absolute independence in Ireland and, in turn, in the colonies.[294] Religion which developed in the colonies beyond the influence of episcopalianism[295] strengthened resistance to the demands of parliament.
In France the difficulties of the paper industry were accompanied by problems of copyright and suppression which favoured continued emigration of printers and the smuggling of French works from Holland and Geneva. ‘Holland was now the great printing press of France and ... it is just to remember the indispensable services rendered by freedom of the press in Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth century, as well as the shelter it gave to French thinkers in the seventeenth, by including Descartes, the greatest of them all.’[296] None of Rousseau's chief works were printed in France. ‘That universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensibility, from one end of the kingdom to another, and which unites in bands of connection men of similar interests and situations has no existence in France.’[297] Publication of a large work such as an encyclopaedia[298] evaded difficulties of copyright and dangers of smuggling, appealed to prestige, and offered possibilities of escaping censorship. An association of publishers undertook support of the project based on Chambers's work in England. After numerous difficulties it was completed over two decades. With its completion secular literature triumphed over old institutions and doctrines. Spiritual power was transferred from ecclesiastical hands to the profession of letters. Theology and metaphysics were dwarfed by the physical sciences. The influence of the encyclopaedia was supported by the press in its attempts to escape the influence of monopoly. Limitations on advertising led to the appearance of diverse clandestine sheets in which leaders waged the battles of the Revolution. ‘L'imprimerie est l'artillerie de la pensée’ (Rivarol). ‘All the wrath and indignation and revolt among the people reverberated first through the newspapers.’[299] The violence of the press was followed by attempts at suppression and with the death of Desmoulins in 1794 freedom disappeared. ‘Si je lache la bride à la presse, je ne resterai pas trois mois au pouvoir’ (Napoleon).[300] The policy of France, which favoured exports of paper and suppression of publication and which increased printing in Holland and England, created a disequilibrium which ended in the Revolution. But this policy resting on a fusion of Church and state became the basis of an empire which extended in North America from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi in the south and to the Saskatchewan in the north, and after its loss to Great Britain, and in turn the collapse of the first British Empire, became a basis of the second British Empire sufficiently secure to permit the reorganization the lack of which had precipitated the crisis of the first British Empire.
With the beginning of the nineteenth century the manufa
cture of paper and of printed material came under the influence of the industrial revolution. During the Napoleonic wars international capital fled from Amsterdam and Paris to England. The paper machine (Fourdrinier) was invented in France and improved and adopted in England.[301] Production was restricted by supplies of rags in spite of an increase in population and textile production until the utilization of wood in the second half of the century gave access to vast new supplies. Total production of paper in the United Kingdom increased from about 11,000 tons of hand-made paper in 1800 to 100,000 tons in 1861, of which 96,000 tons were machine-made, and to 652,000 tons, of which 648,000 tons were machine-made, in 1900.[302] Including imports of paper, consumption reached over a million tons by 1900. Prices declined, roughly from 1s. 6d. a pound in 1800 to 10d. in 1836, 6½d. in 1859, and less than 1d. a pound in 1900. Steam power was applied to printing by The Times in 1814 and gave it a powerful monopoly position in the first half of the century.
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