Beyond the Atlantic: British India, Book Circulation, and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century

Date: 7 July 2015
Time: 5:45 p.m.
Location: Class of 1978 Pavilion, 6th Floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania
Lecturer: Mitch Fraas - Curator, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania

Scholars have long understood that in the eighteenth century, the publishing, reading, and book-buying communities of Europe and the Atlantic world were inextricably linked. In the English-speaking world, libraries and printers in both colonial North America and Great Britain served to disseminate and collect the rapidly accelerating stream of ideas in print that characterized the era. This talk will explore the need to expand this Atlantic view to include the growing world-wide movement of texts and readers in the eighteenth century and describe the little-studied flow of books and manuscripts between libraries, readers, and collectors in colonial South Asia and those in Europe. Combining digital visualization and traditional book history sources including auction records, subscription library catalogs, bibliographies, and material provenance evidence, the lecture will show how understanding this transcontinental circulation of manuscripts and books tells us a different story about the history of ideas and the place of South Asia in the European imagination.