On a brief personal note, these final words are written with a mixture of relief and gratitude. Relief that we have got to the end of the journey; gratitude to the contributors who have brought the volume home. The main burden of the work was carried out throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, with all that it entailed, but nevertheless the contributors’ dedication to the volume and its aims was exemplary. There was a unity of purpose that exhilarated the task and informed the contents.

What was recognised right from the beginning was that we were taking part in an unique editorial project. This first volume is one of three covering the history of the British and Irish press from its seventeenth-century beginnings up until the present day. The three volumes amount to over 2,200 pages, more than 100 contributors, 280-plus images and a bibliography reaching 45,000 words. It is in many ways an extraordinary achievement, and I, as editor of this volume, cannot but congratulate Edinburgh University Press and the general editors of the series, David Finkelstein and Martin Conboy, for their ambition and enterprise.

But it is not just numbers that distinguish the series. Each volume addresses questions related to newspaper and periodical history in the context of general social/political history, cultural history and technological history. These guiding themes require an interdisciplinary array of scholarship which takes time to muster but once together can be very rewarding. In this first volume we have such a global line-up of experts stretching across not only Britain and Ireland but three different continents.

This transnational profile is particularly important, even embodies, what for me is the standout feature of print news and much of the periodical press in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were neither national nor international press agencies, but so much news and press content passed from one country to another and indeed from one newspaper to another. This interconnectedness was seen in the provincial press which borrowed from the London press, the London press which lifted from European publications, and likewise the Irish, Scottish and early American press which also contained much material previously published elsewhere.