Introduction

Most histories of the British press are decidedly insular, and some do not even venture beyond the borders of England. This is both unfortunate and misleading. It should be a truism that the history of the newspaper press is, in large part, transnational. Certainly, newspapers have played a significant role serving economic, political, social and cultural requirements, both local and national. Yet newspapers have also acted as one of the most important interfaces between Britain and a wider world. From the earliest days of their existence, newspapers brought news, opinion and commercial information from overseas. During the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth century, they were arguably the single most important means by which ordinary people could comprehend and imagine the world beyond Britain's shores.

The idea that newspapers created national ‘imagined communities’ has offered many historians a useful shorthand in their attempts to explain how the press helped transform the nature and scale of modern societies (Anderson 1991). However, like all such concepts, it is inevitably a radical simplification. Not only does it ignore the fundamental role played by the press in sustaining other forms of identity (including those based on locality, religion, class and gender), but it also fails to encompass the function of the press as a transnational connector (on transnational connectors see Saunier 2013: 57). The modern press has simultaneously acted as a part of, and a facilitator for, larger worldwide flows of goods, ideas and people. Newspapers developed in the seventeenth century to serve the interests of commerce and finance: from an early stage, such interests were transnational, as well as national, in nature (Parsons 1989: 18). Print capitalism was subsequently driven by the inexorable logic of the market to seek ever-wider opportunities for commercial expansion beyond Britain's shores.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British press created myriad connections with the United States and Europe. Arguably, these places provided the news that most interested British newspaper readers (on links with the US see Wiener and Hampton 2007; Wiener 2011). However, the press also played a key role in connecting Britain with its empire overseas. Imperial readerships, business relationships, and communication links helped shape the commercial and institutional development of British newspapers and periodicals (Potter 2003; Potter 2017).