Print Culture, State Formation, and an Anglo-Scottish Public, 1640–1648

Abstract

AbstractBased upon the idea that debates regarding the “public sphere” have paid insufficient attention to the notion of multiple publics and the movement of texts across state borders, this article explores how print culture provided ways of promoting transterritorial publics. It does so by revisiting the vexed notion of the “British problem” in the seventeenth century and relations between Scottish Covenanters and English parliamentarians, and by emphasizing the need to consider print culture in tandem with state formation. It demonstrates that a significant volume of printed material––produced both in England and Scotland, and sometimes collaboratively––reflected and promoted cross-border cooperation, thereby fostering a nascent Anglo-Scottish public. It also emphasizes that the practices involved were intimately linked to attempts to establish federal political institutions that both responded to the existence of a “British” public and necessitated its further development. Ultimately, however, the need to address and maintain such a public led to printed texts being used to navigate tensions between Covenanters and parliamentarians, to the point where Anglo-Scottish interests gave way to national interests, where resistance grew to the legitimacy of using print as a cross-border device, and where print helped to undermine cross-border cooperation.