History

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.