Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, a burgeoning field of scholarship known as the “history of reading” has developed as a natural extension of the history of print culture and what has come to be known as l’histoire du livre or the history of the book. In some ways, this scholarship is an attempt to shift the focus of attention from the production and circulation of books to their reception and consumption by readers. Like the history of the book, though, the history of reading has for the most part focused near-exclusively on Europe and North America. This essay is a preliminary attempt to fill this gap and bring the history of readers and reading in the non-European world back into focus. It does so by exploring the rise of Armenian printing in the South Asian port city of Madras, where a wealthy Iranian-Armenian merchant from Isfahan had established an Armenian printing press in 1772. The paper briefly touches upon some of the publications that were issued from this press and moves on to examine the printing, on the same press, of the world’s first Armenian-language newspaper, Azdarar (Intelligencer) published from 1794 to 1796. The paper also examines how the growth of Armenian print in Madras was not only part of a larger global Armenian print culture stretching from Amsterdam to Calcutta, but more particularly to how it was intimately connected to developments in Iran where Azdarar had subscribers. Unlike previous scholarship, the paper explores not only the history of printers and printing presses, but also the early modern “history of reading” in Madras. As a case study, it focuses on the reader response of an “ordinary,” semi-literate Armenian reader to an English-language memoir printed in London in 1792 by Joseph Emin, a Calcutta-based Armenian from Hamadan (Iran). To gauge the “reader response” to Joseph Emin’s book, the paper examines several submissions to the “letters to the editor” section of Azdarar in 1795 where an anonymous and barely literate subscriber reports on how a friend had responded to reading Emin’s memoirs. By carefully interpreting an eighteenth century Madras-based reader’s experience of reading Emin’s memoirs of his travels across Europe, Russia, Iran, and India, my study explores the possibility of using a history of reading in the early modern Madras to shed light on the mentalité of the members of the city’s largely Iranian-Armenian community.

Within a few short years between 1815 and 1820, Muslims began printing books across a sequence of distant but no less connected cities, including Calcutta, Cairo, Tabriz, Lucknow and Saint Petersburg. Within a less than two year period, between 1817 and 1819, the first Muslim works were printed in Iran, Egypt and Awadh, three states on the edges of European expansion. In each of the major early cases, Muslim printing occurred on outreach points of European empires and their industrializing products by way of presses, type, and paper. These latter commodities were able to move beyond the political frontiers of empires through the closer contacts forged in this period between Europeans and Iranian, Indian and Arab Muslims. In several of the major cases, we are able to precisely identify the social sequence of knowledge transmission between Christian printer and Muslim journeyman, a word used here in both its senses of ‘apprentice printer’ and ‘traveller.’ This sense of religious identities is important in recognizing the religious dimensions of this print-mediated encounter, since in many cases printing’s first contact was brokered through evangelical Christian organizations and their Muslim helpers or respondents. The locations of the transmission of printing to Muslims (London, Calcutta, Saint Petersburg, Singapore) were therefore not only global nodes of contact, but also missionary centers and evangelical outreach points. Moving from the technological to the textual sphere, the actual content of early Muslim printed works in turn echo the increasingly interpenetrating spheres of Muslim and Christian dialogue, whether in the 1814 Arabic response to Anglican Christianity that Jawad ibn Sabat printed in Calcutta, the Arabic-Italian dictionary that was the first product of the Bulaq press in Cairo, or the Jihadnama against the Russians that was the first Muslim-printed book from Iran. Yet the interplay of evangelicalism and empire were only two factors in the process: the third was industrialization. And it is in this respect that the first Muslim presses need to be placed in a larger global context of the spread of printing in the Americas and Australasia during the same years. It is in this respect that the pioneering Muslim presses are conceivable as ‘frontier presses’ in the same sense as the portable presses carried to the expanding frontiers of America and Australasia.

This paper will analyze the role played by Bombay-based Zoroastrian philanthropic societies in promoting a renewed interest in Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage among early twentieth century Iranians. It will focus on one of the principal methods by which this interest was promoted: the production and export of “neo-Zoroastrian” texts from Bombay to the “reading markets” of Iran. The production of a wide variety of Zoroastrian-themed texts meant for export to Iran became a major preoccupation of Bombay-based Parsi philanthropic societies during the early twentieth century. The texts produced and exported by these philanthropic societies included general histories of pre-Islamic Iran, other texts detailing the Zoroastrian exodus from Iran to Gujarat following the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran in the seventh century, translations (into modern Persian) of Avestan texts long unreadable and unavailable to Iranians, and Zoroastrian-themed periodicals produced in Iran but sponsored through Parsi philanthropy. The history of the production and circulation of these texts will be the subject of this paper. As a growing body of scholarship has shown, the cultural, textual, and economic connections between Iran and India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a profoundly important role in shaping a new Iranian national consciousness. This new Iranian national consciousness came to fruition in the 1920s and 1930s as the “official nationalism” of the newly consolidated Pahlavi state. This official nationalism was to a large extent based on the revival of pre-Islamic Iranian history and the shared religious, racial, and “civilizational” connections between Iran and India. The goal of this paper is to document the textual connections that made possible this new awareness of a shared history between Iran and India. Source material for the paper will include analyzing specific texts that were part of this project of “textual philanthropy.” The paper will also detail specific statements made by Parsis and Iranians about the importance of these texts in forging a new Iranian national consciousness. The paper will also argue that – in contrast to Benedict Anderson’s famous notion of “print-capitalism”—the economic practice of philanthropy, rather than capitalism, guided the role of print in the textual history of Iranian nationalism. In this context, I will argue that the role of print in the history of Iranian nationalism can better be understood through a concept that I will define as “print-patronage.”

This paper explores the circulation of legal ideas in print and manuscript between and among British port cities in South Asia, the broader Indian Ocean world, and Europe before the explosion of mass print in the early nineteenth century. These port cities featured polyglot populations with textual traditions and scribal norms based in a multitude of languages. Building on the work of scholars like Miles Ogborn and Graham Shaw, this paper explicitly focuses on the place of written text in forming a local legal and political culture informed by multiple strains of cross-cultural borrowing and citation. The paper examines the transmission of ideas in this fluid world through an examination of wills, inventories, catalogues and legal records of all kinds. Finally, it shows how the residents of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta gained knowledge about both English and local laws through the lived experience of interacting with the documentary regime of local courts - as writers, readers, and collectors.