• Subscribing to Empire:The Global Expansion of American Subscription Publishing
• John J. Garcia (bio)

In 1884, a New Jersey man named Henry Dwight Stiles (1823–89) published a comparison between bees and people that drew upon his travels in Southeast Asia:

Last January I saw in Singapore, upon a tree in the hotel yard, a large colony of bees. They had no hive or covering: had been there several months. Like the other natives they did very little work. They were high up on a large limb, and no comb was to be seen. I was reminded that necessity was the mother of industry.¹

For most of his life Stiles worked as a farmer and a clerk in Vineland, New Jersey. But in later years "H.D." Stiles moonlighted as a canvassing agent, selling books overseas for the J.B. Burr Publishing Company, a subscription publisher based in Hartford, Connecticut.² Stiles's contentious remarks about the "natives" of Singapore stemmed from his experience as a salesman in a variety of Australian, Asian, and Middle Eastern port cities. But why was this American in Asia in the first place? What brought him there, and how does the book trade figure into his travels?

This essay draws upon the economics of publishing to give context to the travels of H.D. Stiles and explain how nineteenth-century subscription publishers entered into the international trade in books, pictures, and other consumer goods. I demonstrate that subscription publishers and canvassing agents, who have been absent from book histories of the British Empire, targeted Anglophone readers in Asia, Australia, the West Indies, and even parts of the Middle East. The internationalization of the subscription book trade contributed to the burgeoning print cultures of imperial port cities, making this aspect of American publishing a participant in "informal empire," a term that encompasses the political, economic, and cultural relations set forth by British imperial activity across the globe.³ Subscription therefore marks an important and hitherto unrecognized intersection between nineteenth-century [End Page 85] US publishing and global book history, one in which the canvassing agent serves as a crucial link between local, national, and "global" modes of print production, circulation, and consumption.

Scholars have established the period between 1830 and 1914 as one of increased internationalization for English-language publishing, not just for the overseas activity of the British book trade but also in terms of the growing quantity of US exports.⁴ But subscription hasn't been adequately discussed as a transnational or global phenomenon. The leading authority on American publishing in this period, Michael Winship, focuses on trade publishing when considering the international activity of US publishers, and for good reason, since firms like Ticknor and Fields certainly took part in such markets.⁵ Related scholarship on the global networks of the British book trade has similar limitations, framing discussion in terms of wholesale distributors and bookstores, consequently overlooking the movements of canvassing agents.⁶ But even as steamships were transporting more books to retail outlets in imperial or semi-imperial port cities, this era of increasing internationalization was also populated by door-to-door book salesmen (Figure 1).⁷

Recovering the global network of American subscription publishing contributes to an understanding of place and connection in imperial print culture that avoids a simple binary of metropole and periphery in favor of unexpected pathways of print circulation.⁸ I examine a variety of recently discovered and underutilized sources to situate American book agents in Australasia, among other locations. The discussion yields a vastly different geographic scope missing from older scholarship on subscription which focused solely on the US market. Scholars have proven that subscription created a distinct system of book distribution in the nineteenth-century United States, where publishers used individual canvassers to reach customers in person.⁹ By targeting potential readers in their homes and workplaces, subscription bypassed the trade routes of the general merchant, the catalogue, the bookstore, the newsstand, and other urban retailers. The numerous subscription firms comprised a mosaic whose decentralized network reached beyond the eastern US cities to include dispersed communities of readers in the American South, the Midwest, and western regions like California, especially after the...

• 订阅帝国：美国订阅出版的全球扩张
• 约翰·J·加西亚（生物）

1884年，新泽西州一位名叫亨利·德怀特·斯泰尔斯（Henry Dwight Stiles）的人（1823-89）发表了蜜蜂与蜜蜂在东南亚旅行的人的比较：

去年一月，我在新加坡的酒店院子里的一棵树上看到了一大群蜜蜂。他们没有蜂巢或覆盖物：已经在那里呆了几个月了。像其他本地人一样，他们所做的工作很少。它们高高地举在一根大树枝上，看不到梳子。提醒我，必需品是工业之母。^1个

在他一生的大部分时间里，Stiles都是新泽西州Vineland的农民和文员。但是在后来的几年里，“ HD” Stiles成为了拉票代理商，为位于康涅狄格州哈特福德的订阅出版商JB Burr Publishing Company在海外出售书籍。² Stiles关于新加坡“本地人”的有争议的评论源于他在澳大利亚，亚洲和中东各个港口城市担任推销员的经验。但是，为什么这个美国人排在亚洲首位呢？是什么把他带到那里的，而书本贸易如何影响他的旅行呢？

本文利用出版的经济学为高清Stiles的旅行提供背景，并解释19世纪订阅出版商如何进入书籍，图片和其他消费品的国际贸易。我证明了大英帝国的书籍历史所缺的订阅出版商和拉票代理，针对的是亚洲，澳大利亚，西印度群岛甚至中东部分地区的英语阅读者。认购书贸易的国际化促进了帝国港口城市新兴的印刷文化，使美国出版这一方面成为“非正式帝国”的参与者，该术语涵盖了英国帝国主义活动所确立的政治，经济和文化关系。在全球范围内。³因此，订阅标志着十九世纪以前迄今尚未认识到的重要交叉点。[结束第85页]美国出版与全球图书历史之间的交流，其中拉票代理是本地，国家和“全球”印刷生产模式之间的重要纽带，流通和消费。

学者们已将1830年至1914年作为英语出版国际化程度不断提高的时期之一，这不仅是因为英国图书贸易的海外活动，还因为美国出口数量的增加。⁴但是，作为跨国或全球现象，订阅尚未得到充分讨论。在考虑到美国出版商的国际活动时，这一时期美国出版的主要机构Michael Winship专注于贸易出版，这是有充分的理由的，因为像Ticknor和Fields这样的公司肯定参与了这些市场。⁵关于英国图书贸易的全球网络的相关奖学金也有类似的局限性，使得有关批发分销商和书店的讨论陷入了困境，因此忽略了拉票代理的动向。⁶但是，即使轮船将更多的书籍运送到帝国或半帝国港口城市的零售点，挨家挨户的书店销售人员也占据了这个日益国际化的时代（图1）。⁷

恢复美国订阅出版的全球网络有助于理解帝国印刷文化中的位置和联系，从而避免了大都会和周边地区的简单二元化，而倾向于意料之外的印刷流通途径。⁸我研究了各种新近发现和未充分利用的资源，这些资源用于在大洋洲以及其他地区安置美国图书代理商。讨论产生了完全不同的地理范围，而原来的奖学金只专注于美国市场，而以前的奖学金则缺失了这一范围。学者们证明，订阅在19世纪的美国创造了独特的图书发行系统，在该系统中，出版商使用单独的拉票员亲自联系客户。⁹通过针对潜在读者的家庭和工作场所，订阅可以绕开一般商人，目录，书店，报摊和其他城市零售商的贸易路线。众多订阅公司组成了一个马赛克，其分散网络遍及美国东部城市以外，包括美国南部，中西部和加利福尼亚等西部地区的分散读者社区，尤其是在...