The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals

This Companion showcases the latest research into British colonial periodicals by leading scholars in the field. The first ever large-scale attempt to gather into one volume research on British colonial periodicals, the chapters in this volume analyse the fundamental role played by colonial periodicals in sustaining as well as contesting the economic, political and cultural hegemony of the British Empire from its inception to its fall. The volume considers both periodicals published in Britain for colonial consumption and those published in British colonies and dominions.

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).

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.