The European Press and News in the Mediterranean and India, c. 1650-1800

This book reconstructs the first attempts to integrate Europe and Asia in terms of newspaper distribution, reception, and news coverage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The East India Companies shared news via the “overland route” from Aleppo through Persia to India by using professional runners, riders, and postal relay systems. This book reminds us of the special character of the European handwritten and printed newspapers in Italy, Germany, France, and England as a precondition for what merchants in India and the Levant were likely to miss abroad. Comparative sections address such newspapers’ relationship with the Moghul newsletter system (akhbarat) and whether the European Enlightenment was “meeting” a global Indian Renaissance in terms of news circulation. The conclusion compares these Euro-Indian realities with similar handwritten news circulation and printed press in China and in the Americas. Cornel Zwierlein has taught early modern history in Germany since 2001 at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (PhD and postdoctoral period) and Freie Universität Berlin (Heisenberg Fellowship), and he is teaching at the Ruhr University Bochum (habilitation rights). He has worked in cooperation with, and researched at, such institutions as Harvard and Yale Universities and the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, as well as in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and beyond.