The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence

This pioneering study explores the export of books from Britain to early-independent Spanish America, considering all phases of production, distribution, reading, and re-writing of British books in the region. It examines the role these works played in the formation of national identities in the new countries.

Analysing in particular the publishing house of Rudolph Ackermann, which dominated the export of British books in Spanish to the former colonies in the 1820s, it discusses how the printed form of these publications affected the knowledge conveyed by them.

After a survey of the peculiar characteristics of print culture in early-independent Spanish America and the trends in the import of European books in the region, the author examines the operation of Ackermann's publishing enterprise. She shows how the collaborative nature of this enterprise, involving Spanish American diplomats as sponsors and Spanish exiles as writers and translators, shaped the characteristics of its publications.

She also discusses how the notion of "useful knowledge" conveyed by these publications was deployed in the service of both commercial and educational concerns. The hitherto unexplored mechanisms of book import, distribution, wholesale, and retailing in Spanish America in the 1820s are analyzed, as is the way in which the significance of the knowledge transmitted by those books shifted during their production and distribution.

The author examines how the question-and-answer form of Ackermann's textbooks constrained both publishers and writers, and how it oriented readers' relations with the texts. She then explores the various ways in which foreign knowledge was appropriated in constructing individual, social, national, and continental identities, through the study of individual reading experiences and the analysis of editions and adaptations of Ackermann's textbooks during the nineteenth century.