Colonial Trade Identity and Labour Information Exchange in the International Typographical Trade Press, 1840–1910

Examining the typographical trade journals that emerged in Britain, the United States, South Africa, India, New Zealand and Australia in the nineteenth century, this chapter analyses the London-based Compositors’ Chronicle (1840–3), the Typographical Circular (1854–8), the Melbourne-based Australian Typographical Circular (1858–60), the Edinburgh-based Scottish Typographical Circular (1857–), the New Zealand circular Typo (1887–97), the South African Typographical Circular (1898–), the Australasian Typographical Journal (1870–1916) and the Indian Printers’ Journal (1895–6, 1912–13). The earliest of these journals conjoined literary with professional material to inform, entertain, educate, and support the development of a cooperative and shared professional trade identity. These periodicals fulfilled overlapping functions: as guardians of historical craft memory; as chroniclers of contemporary labour concerns; and as the discursive expression of a trans-colonial trade brotherhood. In colonial settings, however, these periodicals’ rhetoric of an egalitarian trade brotherhood foundered, as print unions in colonial spaces emphasised a trade identity that was overwhelmingly white, male and colonialist in intention. The typographical journals thus fed into the wider, trans-imperial discourses of colonialism, generating a trade identity integral to a racially exclusive, trans-global British settler identity.