The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence

Education and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective

Eugenia Roldán Vera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351893657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence is a pioneering study of the export of books from Britain to early-independent Spanish America, which considers all phases of production, distribution, reading, and re-writing of British books in the region, and explores the role that 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 the ways in which 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 a number of Spanish American diplomats as sponsors and Spanish exiles as writers and translators, shaped the characteristics of its publications, and how the notion of 'useful knowledge' conveyed by them 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 also analysed as is the way in which the significance of the knowledge transmitted by those books shifted in the course of their production and distribution. The author examines how the question-and-answer form of Ackermann's textbooks constrained both publishers and writers and oriented their readers' relation with the texts. She then looks at the various ways in which foreign knowledge was appropriated in the construction of individual, social, national, and continental identities; this is done through the study of a number of individual reading experiences and through the analysis of the editions and adaptations of Ackermann's textbooks during the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1

Print Culture and the Modern Order

The freedom of the press, the trials by jury on printing press matters, the public attendance to the Chambers and Legislative Assemblies… the electoral juntas, the representative form, and the patriotic societies or orderly meetings of the citizens to examine their government's resolutions, could be considered the equivalent of the gatherings of citizens in the public squares of the ancient republics of Athens, Rome or Florence.¹

LORENZO DE ZAVALA, Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de México desde 1808 hasta 1830 (1831–2)

The years that followed the independence of the Spanish American countries saw impressive changes in print culture. Printing and the circulation of books became much less regulated, mass education and literacy became a major concern of all the governments, and the reading public seemed increasingly avid for material through which to make sense of their new status in their country and in respect of the rest of the world. The printing press became a symbol of modernity and one of the principal agents for social change. Yet for all the modern values conferred to the printed word, the technical conditions of the publishing industry in Spanish America, although very varied among the different countries, were in general rather precarious. The book trade was incipient, the prices of books remained high and literacy did not increase at the speed that government reforms intended. This contradictory situation prevents historians—constrained by the limited research still available on the subject—from agreeing on whether there was indeed a ‘revolution’ in print culture in these years or whether reading simply became a more intense activity for the traditionally cultured elites.

In this chapter I want to contribute to the understanding of the transformation in print culture in this period by looking at quantitative and qualitative changes in book production, circulation of print, the relation between print and educational policies, and the symbolic dimensions of bookselling practices in the period 1800 to 1840s. I will analyse some of the political, legal, economic and social features involved in these transformations, and will introduce the notion that a substantial part of these changes was due to the deliberate opening-up of these countries to international trade, foreign goods and imported ideas.

A guiding line in the analysis of these issues was my discovery of the remarkable dissemination of the publications of Rudolph Ackermann in most of the Spanish American countries throughout the nineteenth century. This publisher produced nearly 80 titles of books and periodicals in Spanish (listed in Appendix 1). During the short period of 1823–1830, for distribution, as its catalogue advertised, in ‘Mexico, Colombia (meaning the confederation that comprised today's Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador),² Buenos Aires (today's Argentina and Bolivia), Chile, Peru, and Guatemala (or the United States of Central America, comprising today's Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica)’.³ After 1830 Ackermann & Co., ran by the publisher's sons, published only three or four titles in Spanish but continued producing two journals in that language between 1834 and 1845. The most intriguing aspect of this story is that, in spite of the short duration of this publishing venture, Ackermann's titles can be found in numerous catalogues of bookshops, libraries— especially libraries of institutions of secondary and higher education—and private collections all over Spanish America throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, library catalogues register dozens of reprints of Ackermann's catechisms published in the Spanish American countries or in France over the whole of the nineteenth century (reprints listed in Appendix 3). But when we look at the conditions of the publishing industry and the book trade in Spanish America in the post-independent years, the widespread distribution of Ackermann's books appears not only remarkable but also puzzling. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon lies in the peculiar characteristics of the changes in print culture that took place during this formative period for all Spanish American countries.

A ‘Modern’ Order

The period that covers the last decades of the eighteenth century, the independence movements and the first years of the post-colonial era in Spanish America, has been described by some historians as one of transition from the so-called 'Ancien Régime’ to so-called ‘Modernity’. These categories are not unproblematic (and are certainly anachronistic), but they are useful to understand the kind of transformations that were taking place in that epoch: it was basically the shift from a system of absolutist monarchy to republican regimes, and this was related to changes in political culture.

In legal and judiciary terms, this shift meant that the sovereignty of the nation was no longer held by the King but by the citizens, who should exert it through the election of their representatives to the local and national governments. The constitutions of the new countries gave political rights to all men who had an honest way of living regardless of their ethnicity or social rank, in a (limited) effort to put an end to the colonial judicial division into ‘estates’ of Indians, Spanish, mestizos, blacks and castes. At the same time, the new governments also implemented reforms tending to the dismantling of the colonial corporate system—whereby individuals had particular privileges and protections by virtue of their belonging to guilds, the military or the clergy—that hindered a direct relation between the individual and the State.

Through these reforms, new concepts of public participation in political affairs and new forms of relationship between individuals and the State were developed. On the one hand, education became both a demand of the citizenry and a necessity of the governments to legitimate themselves in a representative regime; this led to substantial reforms tending to expand elementary education and give uniformity to secondary and higher education. On the other hand, the notion of the ‘public space’ as the physical place where political ideas could be openly discussed appeared for the first time. New forms of socializing were developed in a variety of those public spaces, especially in the cities, and novel practices of communication and participation took shape: from tertulias, literary associations and coffee shops, to discussion of public affairs on the streets and plazas and practices of collective reading.⁴

Although these were significant social changes, it is not possible to speak of a general transformation when the changes were restricted to urban places and when ‘modern’ and ‘old’ practices coexisted as they were for many decades completely indistinguishable. The shift towards a ‘modern order’ could not be homogeneous in societies that remained organized according to actual class and ethnic divides—in spite of their official abolition by law. It was a gradual, partial, conflicted and uneven transition from a traditional, monarchic and corporate society to a representative, secular one, based on a ‘social pact’ between the individual and the State.

At any rate, within the context of these transformations print culture underwent some very important changes. The political shift brought about a radical transformation in the norms and conventions that governed the production and distribution of print. Thus, modern forms of communication and circulation of ideas were developed in relation to the freeing of the press, the multiplication of the number of printing presses, the emergence of new genres, the lifting of restrictions on the import of foreign books, the expansion of the reading public, and the appearance of novel reading practices.

The notion of print culture as a modern form of communication favourable for the construction of some kind of ‘public sphere’ echoes Jürgen Habermas’ set of assumptions for the formation of such a sphere in the development of bourgeois society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. However, the particularities of the Spanish American case and the unevenness of the transformations for the different social groups necessitates caution in using these concepts. Guerra and Lempérière suggest that it is more appropriate to speak of a variety of concrete, heterogeneous and overlapping public spaces than of an overarching and immaterial ‘public sphere’, whose characteristics do not fit in societies so torn between traditional and modern forms.⁵ My understanding of this ‘public sphere’ is different from the Habermasian idealistic view of the public sphere as non-instrumental—that is, as something constructed by ‘private persons come together as public’ and not by particular interest groups—and as entirely governed by reason.⁶ In the Spanish American case there were clearly defined political groups who made use of those new forms of communication for purposes of political legitimacy. Actually, the small size of the cultured elites meant that most of the ‘private individuals’ who took part in public discussion were active members of the expanded government sphere of the republican regimes. It is also possible that the changes that favoured the circulation of ideas in printed form in independent Spanish America resulted not only from changes in political culture, but also from a series of economic and social circumstances that had more to do with government disorganization, the economies opening up to world trade and foreign investment, than with changes in private/public participation in Habermas’ sense.⁷

The Spread of Print

At the onset of independence, the state of the publishing industry in Spanish America varied widely from country to country. Under the Spanish domination the majority of books (including some non-Spanish ones) used to be brought from the metropolis, through the filter of the Inquisition, and the local authorities restricted publishing in the colonies. In some of them there was not even a single printing press. Whereas New Spain (Mexico), Guatemala and Peru had had important printing traditions since the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Other colonies like New Granada, Buenos Aires and Chile only acquired printing presses in the later years of the Spanish domination, and the Central American countries (formerly dependent of the Captaincy of Guatemala) did not obtain theirs until the 1820s and 1830s. Under Spanish rule, every book had to be examined by the Consejo de Indias or the Real Audiencia before it went into print, and the publication of popular religious books was monopolized by a few printers who were granted the royal privilege to do so.⁸ Nevertheless, it is estimated that during colonial times around 30,000 titles were printed throughout Spanish America, of which 12,000 alone were produced in New Spain.⁹ The bibliographical production of the Spanish empire has been compiled in the monumental works of José Toribio Medina¹⁰ but no similar comprehensive lists have been prepared for the period after the end of the independence wars.¹¹

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century the independence movements sparked off a great development of printing and accelerated the circulation of printed material. The uncertain situation of Spain under the French occupation, the dissemination of modern political ideas, and the wars of independence themselves generated a great demand for fresh news. Moreover, the freedom of the press and the abolition of the Inquisition in all the Spanish Empire declared by the liberal 1812 Spanish Constitution opened up an unprecedented space for public discussion. Periodicals, pamphlets and leaflets (but few books) were produced on a scale never seen before, and some armies carried around their own hand presses to produce manifestos and war reports. Thanks to the more widespread availability of print, reading, individually and collectively, increased significantly. Although this was aided by the expansion of elementary schooling effected by the Bourbon reforms of the latest decades of the eighteenth century, access to print seems to have been the most important factor in the spread of reading. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Translation
• Monetary Equivalences
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Print Culture and the Modern Order
• 2 Books for Spanish America
• 3 Book Distribution
• 4 Reading in Questions and Answers
• 5 Post-Colonial Identities
• 6 Textbooks Re-Written
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1Ackermann’s Spanish Publications
• Appendix 2Ackermann’s Spanish Publications (excluding Catechisms)
• Appendix 3Edition of Ackermann’s Catechisms*
• Bibliography
• Index