This book is an edited volume of essays that showcases how books played a crucial role in making and materialising histories of travel, scientific exchanges, translation, and global markets from the late-eighteenth century to the present. While existing book historical practice is overly dependent on models of the local and the national, we suggest that approaching the book as a cross-region, travelling ¿ and therefore global- object offers new approaches and methodologies for a study in global perspective. By thus studying the book in its transnational and inter-imperial, textual, inter-textual and material dimensions, this collection will highlight its key role in making possible a global imagination, shaped by networks of print material, readers, publishers and translators.

Moves Book History beyond its typically Eurocentric roots to a global range of contexts

Chapter 1. Introduction.- SECTION ONE: COLONIAL NETWORKS.- Chapter 2. London's Geographic Knowledge Network and the Anson Account (1748) - Katherine Parker.- Chapter 3. The Other Empire: Australian Books and American Publishers in the late nineteenth century- David Carter.- Chapter 4. Reading by Chance in a World of Wandering Texts - Alexander Bubb.- SECTION TWO: GLOBAL GENRES.- Chapter 5. 'Read! Learn!': Globalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing - Gail Low.- Chapter 6. Governing by the Book: Mediterranean Travel and Sanitary Prophylaxis in the Nineteenth-Century - Riccardo Liberatore.- Chapter 7. The Circle of Knowledge: Radical Commensurability and the Deaf Textbook - Hansun Hsiung.- SECTION THREE: READING RELATIONSHIPS.- Chapter 8. 'Bringing Spring to Sahbai's Rose-Garden': Persian Printing in North India after 1857 - Zahra Shah.- Chapter 9. Reading The Discoveryof India in the Library of an Australian Prime Minister - Sybil Nolan.- SECTION FOUR: CULTURAL TRANSLATION.- Chapter 10. Bust¿n¿'s Iliad and Imperialism in the Middle East - Evelyn Richardson.- Chapter 11. 'The Narcissism of Small Differences': Plagiarism in South African Letters - Kate Highman.- Chapter 12. The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic - Ben Holgate.- Afterword - Elleke Boehmer.