The Scottish-Chesapeake Tobacco Trade and the Economics of Book Importation

abstract:As a range of recent scholarship attests, "the history of the book in America is not a history of American books." This approach has led to a focus on the trans-Atlantic nature of the book trade and the relationships between printers and booksellers in print centers such as London and Edinburgh with retailers in colonial cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Still, recent scholarship has not fully addressed a central facet of colonial book trade networks: the history of the book in America is not simply the history of books and the economics of book exchange, but, rather, the history of much larger economic networks that facilitated the circulation of print throughout the colonies, in rural as well as urban areas. This essay explores the impact of one of these larger economic networks, built around tobacco, on the book trade in the colonial Chesapeake. The efforts of Scottish tobacco merchants, in particular, in stocking books created new avenues for print circulation in the Chesapeake and helped serve the needs of a population of readers within the colonial interior. Studying their efforts as booksellers emphasizes the wide range of cultural exchanges that the tobacco trade helped facilitate.