Over at OnFiction Keith Oatley tells us that, in the days of Erasmus, private letters were passed around from person to person and so functioned a bit like blogs:
Until I read Johan Huizinga's biography of Erasmus, I had not realized that, before the coming of print culture which Erasmus was one of the first to use, although people would address handwritten letters to particular people they often intended them to be read more widely. Alongside formal readings at churches and synagogues, and lectures in universities, and before the emergence of magazines and newspapers, letters were means by which ideas could circulate. People would pass them around. You can see a vestige of this practice in some scientific reports called "Letters" to the journal Nature. In the nineteenth century, letters became more exclusively personal and intimate. Sealing wax, and subsequently envelopes, became normal. The purpose of letters had narrowed to become the continuation of conversation of the kind that functions to maintain close relationships.
The blog, therefore, is the perfect descendant of the kinds of letters that circulated before the age of print. No longer tied to the physical, thoughts in the form of electronic words can now be passed around more widely than previously.
Steven Hahn reviews James Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism, in The New Republic:
James Fichter’s wonderful and important book suggests that the Atlanticists may be far less cosmopolitan than they presume. Fichter tells a story of war, empire, trade, smuggling, capital accumulation, and enormous transformations in political economy between the last decade of the eighteenth century and the third decade of the nineteenth. And the main actors would be familiar to anyone interested in the Atlantic world of the time: Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. But in Fichter’s telling, their world is the Pacific and Indian Oceans; and if he is right, they may have played a far more significant role there than we have previously thought. Indeed, Fichter finds in the East India trade both the reconfiguring of British empire and an enormous stimulus to American economic development.
Americans have had a much longer history in the Pacific and Indian Oceans than we usually recognize. In the early eighteenth century, as British subjects, they either engaged in smuggling and piracy or worked in more legitimate ways with the British East India Company, which was chartered by Parliament and the Crown. Almost within moments of American independence, they were then coursing and trading in the East Indies on their own. The first American merchant vessels reached Asia in 1784 and struck up relations in a number of ports, even in India where the East India Company permitted access.
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