Afterword

What is at stake in exploring colonialism and print from the perspective of social history? This collection of articles shows how a social history perspective can tie together people, places, and themes that are often kept separate, opening new avenues of inquiry. As the editors argue in their introduction, by focusing on “the materiality of printing and the ground-level practices and “tactics” of production and circulation,” we can locate “histories of print within the world of comparative social analysis, rather than singularly within book, cultural, or intellectual history.” And, we might add, this in turn enables us to reach a deeper appreciation of the operation of colonial print and print’s place in the history of the modern world.

In this short afterword, I would like to pull together some of the themes that stand out for me in this collection, and what they might suggest in terms of ways forward for research. My perspective is as a historian of print culture, and more particularly print media, in twentieth-century Africa.