Thacker, Spink and Company: Bookselling and Publishing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Abstract

Sydney Shep’s chapter on ‘The Transnational Turn in Book History’, with which the first volume of the collection Books Without Borders opens, sets out to argue that prevailing frames of reference need to be re-thought to enable book history as a discipline to move forward. One way of achieving this goal might be to deconstruct and then expand national book histories so as to arrive at ‘the essential nature of our object of study: books without borders’.1 In the present volume both David Finkelstein and Robert Fraser demonstrate, in their respective chapters on book consumption and publishing in British India (Chapters 6 and 9), how the imperial commercial nexus supplied in itself a convincing illustration of Shep’s cross-national paradigm. India was manifestly part of the Empire, and yet the kinds of books imported into the sub-continent from Britain, or else published in India itself, crossed every sort of frontier, and not just geographical ones. The activities of a British-Indian firm such as Thacker, Spink and Company shed light on this facet of book production, distribution and reception. They also provide a commentary on, and manifold insights into, the nature of British rule.