AS THIS VOLUME's CHAPTERS have insisted, the transnational and global ambit is crucial to fuller understanding of the changing relationships between ideas and literary materialities in the Enlightenment world. More than sixty years after the publication of L’Apparition du Livre (‘The Coming of the Book’) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, studies in what has become known as ‘book history’ have revolutionized the scope of bibliographical scholarship. Until recently, however, the new ‘book histories’ remained largely bound by nationally or linguistically based frameworks. They all too rarely engaged with adventurous research, both ongoing and well-established but conducted outside Europe and North America, concerning other vehicles for the conveyance of thought, approaches to the history of material objects, and communication networks in broad cultural-historical terms.

Whether it be contrasting European literary perceptions of China, the construction of iconic images of a British past, or the sharing of knowledge of the Orient, at issue is the interplay between textual content and the physical design and material construction of written or printed materials. In different ways, the preceding chapters reveal how, at a critical period in global interchange, textual meaning and appreciation were filtered by materiality and paratextual disposition, by the relationship between images and printed and or written characters and by the further interventions of letterpress, engraving and other methods of textual replication – and crucially, the relationship between them. Such relationships entailed numerous and complex hierarchies and dependencies, whether in non-representational Qur’anic penmanship and engraving, inked talipot palm leaf, hand-painting on printed and translated statistical charts, Christian missionary tracts or woodcuts and poor-quality intaglio accompanying subversive or scandalous literature. As contributors to this volume have made clear, transformations and transpositions were multiple. The aim has been to combine understanding of the intellectual and the material in the creation, diffusion and reception of different editions in different formats and translated languages, including adaptations, abridgements, illustrations, dedications, commentaries, advertisements and annotations. All these aspects generate their own questions: how, for example, did translated editions which might already have subtly changed meaning from the original (especially if abridged), convey knowledge and understanding even more differently when repackaged and published (and sometimes after a gap of many years) in different regional or national contexts?

HOW FAR DOES THE production of attractive books with careful design, fine typography, quality paper and well-crafted images assist in making the incredible believable? This chapter offers a test case.

Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, published his Det første Forsøg paa Norges naturlige Historie in Copenhagen in two parts in 1752 and 1753. It was translated into German as Versuch einer natürlichen Geschichte Nor-wegens and the first part published, also in Copenhagen, a year later in 1753, with the second part following in 1754. A year after that, both parts were translated into English and published together in London as The Natural History of Norway. The three editions, in Danish, in German and in Eng-lish, issued between 1752 and 1755, forged the reputation of the Naturlige Historie; no further editions of the full work were published, although the publications of the 1750s spawned numerous later extracts, commentaries and references. Plentiful illustrative engravings and, in the London version, a pull-out map, accompanied the different printed editions. Numerous European periodicals reviewed Pontoppidan's work. Major institutions across mainland Europe ordered the Danish- and German-language edi-tions, and, most conspicuously, the English edition was bought by dozens of institutions and significant writers and collectors around the world.

The London edition was the finest and in many ways the most authoritative version of Pontoppidan's great endeavour, even though it was not in the original language. Its success, this chapter argues, was the result of the intersection of ideas and material forms and of the appreciation and subliminal effect of that union both then and since. Comparative study of the Naturlige Historie reveals how different translations, not only in language but in format, typographical choices and designs, inserted and re-cut illustrations, and publication and promotional processes contributed to different valences of authenticity and authority, and, as this chapter details, to a legacy of debate and influence.

By focusing study on a single title, we might chart the history of an individual work from its genesis, publication, circulation and reception in different forms and in different places across generations of use and conservation.

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS volume share the conviction that the acceptance and influence of ideas is importantly related to the modes of their conveyance. Thirteen contributors examine how the material production and circulation of different textual objects affected the ways in which information and knowledge were formulated, transmitted and received in different parts of the world between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The chapters address connected concerns: the relationship between developing textual forms and the subjects of publication, the origins and effects of changing operations of long-distance communication and the consequences of differing modes of reception.

The physical and communicative forms by which ideas reach their listeners and readers, in all their great variety and in so many different locations, can reinforce, qualify, question and undermine ideological confidence and trust. That materiality (which might be loosely but not exhaustively termed ‘media’), the conditions for it and the deciphering and discursive practices that proceed from it, present, filter and influence the reception of messages and knowledge. Effects range from supporting and questioning conviction to exposing or complicating falsity and propaganda. The unfamiliarity of material forms of books, pamphlets and the like to recipients in newly accessible regions of the globe added to the problematic and unpredictable manner in which knowledge was received (a complexity involving materials coming to Europe as much as from Europe).

The two hundred or so years covered by this volume were years of recurrent European wars and revolutions. The conveyance of ideas and information took on unprecedented importance. Profound social, religious, cultural, economic and technological change accompanied conflict and disorder and the formation of new habits of mind associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It was also a period of unprecedented overseas exploration and invasion, of brutal conquest and enslavement and of a re-evaluation of the human. The technological advances brought increasing possibilities for knowledge transfer and exchange between peoples in different parts of the world, many of whom, for better or worse, were in contact with each other for the first time.

Printers’ products and services contributed to an economic transformation of startling range and complexity. The ‘English miracle’ was part of broader British developments, coaxed by changing political frameworks across the three kingdoms and by expansion overseas. At the close of the seventeenth century, England exported goods to the value of ￡6.5 million per year and imported goods worth about ￡6 million. By 1816, English, Scottish and Irish exports were worth ￡39 million in official (constant price) values; imports were worth ￡33.6 million. An English and Welsh national income of about ￡48 million in 1688 compares to a combined English, Welsh and Scottish national income of ￡232 million on the eve of Irish union in 1801. By 1815, textiles, comprising almost four-fifths of total exports, were as dominant a proportion of exports as they had been in 1695, but cotton, not wool, was now king. As a result of colonial consolidation, particularly in the West Indies, the re-export of tobacco, sugar and other overseas produce comprised about a third of all exports from the 1690s until the early 1770s. By then re-exports roughly equalled the value of all domestic exports to Europe.

With the Navigation Acts ensuring that colonial primary produce was sent directly to the home country and not to other European markets, a quarter or more of all imports to England and Scotland were re-exported in the years prior to 1775. The value of the entrepot trade was halved during the American revolutionary wars, but British naval supremacy ensured an impressive re-export recovery during the European wars after 1793. Between 1814 and 1816 just over a quarter of all goods sent out from English ports were re-exports. Industrial production was based on textiles (predominantly wool and later, cotton), the manufacturing industries of shipbuilding, construction, metal smelting and refining, and a variety of derivative finishing trades. In 1700, Sir Ambrose Crowley’s Sunderland iron factory was the largest in Europe, nine years before Abraham Darby established his famous works in Coalbrookdale. In the same decade an average of 16,000 tons of iron were imported and 1,600 tons of iron and steel were exported each year.