On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775)

Taking as its point of departure the lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695, this book examines the lead up to the passage of the Statute of Anne 1710 and charts the movement of copyright law throughout the eighteenth century, culminating in the House of Lords decision in Donaldson v Becket (1774). The established reading of copyright's development throughout this period, from the 1710 Act to the pronouncement in Donaldson, is that it was transformed from a publisher's right to an author's right; that is, legislation initially designed to regulate the marketplace of the bookseller and publisher evolved into an instrument that functioned to recognise the proprietary inevitability of an author's intellectual labour. The historical narrative which unfolds within this book presents a challenge to that accepted orthodoxy. The traditional analysis of the development of copyright in eighteenth-century Britain is revealed to exhibit the character of long-standing myth, and the centrality of the modern proprietary author as the raison d'etre of the modern copyright regime is displaced.

Making British Indian Fictions, 1772-1823

This book examines fictional representations of India in novels, plays and poetry produced between the years 1772 to 1823 as historical source material. It uses literary texts as case studies to investigate how Britons residing both in the metropole and in India justified, confronted and imagined the colonial encounter during this period. The study will situate the texts in relation to the shifting colonial context and to the changing attitudes towards India within Britain in general and on the part of Britons who had experience of living in India, such as East India Company men or their wives and daughters, in particular. Moreover, it will analyse how this literature responded to the increasing influence of the subcontinent on metropolitan culture. This book, then, approaches fictional texts as case studies that illuminate trends taking place within Britain such as the growing consumption of Indian-style imported goods and the commoditisation of an Indian aesthetic within British visual culture. Whilst the book will utilise fictional portrayals to comment upon shifts in the relationship between coloniser and colonised and to discuss the cross-cultural influences between the metropole and the colonial periphery, it also outlines how literary production and print capitalism played a part in shaping depictions of the subcontinent and stereotypes of the colonial 'other'. The study will also examine how representations of the subcontinent in British art and scholarship were influenced by metropolitan literary and popular culture. At the same time it will look at how representations by metropolitan authors influenced early-nineteenth century depictions by British authors who resided in India.