Printers on the Move: Migration, Identity and Printing Skills Transfer Across the English Speaking World, 1840-1914
Throughout the long nineteenth century, the printing industry and its highly mobile force of skilled workers were central actors in a process of global knowledge exchange.
Supported by union sponsored emigration and removal grants, printers migrated overseas to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and the U.S. They set up businesses, engaged in labour and union politics, and created the print culture infrastructures that sustained social, communal and national communication and identity.
The movement of skilled printing labour was not all one way: there is evidence of such emigrants circulating across multiple regions and national borders throughout their working lives, thus highlighting the porous nature of the so-called British Empire in providing space for such cultural transmitters to flourish.
The impact of such a highly literate, skilled and mobile labour force across the English-speaking world during a crucial period in colonial development is one that has yet to be studied in detail. This project aims to data mine primary sources from relevant shipping and migration records, trade union journals, diaries and other cultural artefacts to map international movements of knowledge and personnel across the English-speaking colonial world. The results will yield a rich, complex picture of global patterns of skilled labour movements in the formation of communication networks, and of their social, cultural and linguistic impact on local communities.
People
- Professor David Finkelstein, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
- Dr Mary Hammond
- Dr Sydney Shep, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand