The Importance of the Free Press in the Colonial World

I was interested in thinking more about then how print operated in these colonial public spheres and whether indeed the term colonial public sphere is a way of capturing what we're talking about. So that's led to a project which I've been working on over the last few years with Leslie James at QMUL now and with other colleagues in Cambridge and beyond. We're looking at the various case studies through the lenses of materiality, periodicity, chromativity and addressivity to better understand how print operates. The idea of the free press was important to colonial officials as well and they would say explicitly if we take again Mamboleo as an example  is not censored. It's a powerful