During the nineteenth century a wide variety of Englishlanguage newspapers and reviews were published. The English press thrived in continental Europe, in areas where virtually no English was spoken. Until recently such cultural spaces have been ignored by academic researchers. Recent initiatives, such as the Transfopress research network (http://transfopresschcsc.wixsite.com/transfopress) have begun recovering English-language press material, although the studies available do not yet by any means cover all the countries in which it is likely that such papers were published. The lack of interest hitherto shown by researchers in this large corpus of documents can be explained by the fact that periodicals, in general, and culturally rich periodicals in particular, have traditionally been the preferred source for the study of national political and literary history. The more ephemeral dailies, weeklies and specialised English-language newspaper press published abroad, as well as in British possessions, has either not been considered relevant or seen as having a narrow local value. Moreover, library holdings of such material are uneven, often difficult to access, undigitised or not clearly catalogued. At the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF), for instance, Galignani's Messenger is currently the only nineteenth-century French-based English-language press example to have been digitised, despite the presence of numerous other examples in their holdings.

Except in relation to France, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, research on the European English press is sparse, though abundant exemplars exist. However, within this immense quantity of unexplored documents, the full extent of which is currently unknown, there can be found valuable insights into the history of the British abroad, their social and cultural habits, their sources of information, as well as the links they established with their new environment. While such periodicals may have in common the English language, they nevertheless offer very diverse snapshots of cultural history depending on where they were published and their target readership.

In France and Italy, the press in English was primarily aimed at leisured visitors and those residents who wished to be kept informed of international politics and culture. In the Ottoman Empire, in Constantinople and Smyrna, and also in France and the Canaries, English-language business journals and newspapers were published for consumption by local business communities.