In his meticulously researched and gracefully written new book, Joseph M. Adelman examines how “printing—its trade and commercial practices—shaped the content of political debates” during the era of the American Revolution (p. 3). Adelman argues that “printers played a crucial role in the formation and shaping of political rhetoric during the American Revolution” and were able to do so “as part of the ordinary course of business” (p. 3). Focusing on the networks that printers developed over time, Adelman reveals how commercial connections became “not just indispensable but in fact necessary and vital to the Patriot cause,” contributing to a growing body of scholarship that examines the intersection of print and politics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (p. 3).

The book's first chapter focuses on how printers in the British North American colonies developed and utilized commercial networks for everyday business transactions. Adelman explores how “the geographically expansive nature of printing stimulated the creation of trade networks that more closely resembled those of merchants” at the end of the Seven Years’ War (p. 20). Printers relied on local, regional, and continental connections to survive in an expensive and competitive market. Adelman also discusses how several colonial North American women plied their trade as printers, including Sarah Goddard, Margaret Draper, Clementine Rind, Anne Catharine Green, Elizabeth Holt, and Ann Timothy—a welcome addition to a field so often dominated by stories of male printers.

Moving beyond scholarship that views the imperial crisis as one riddled with conspiracy, and the Stamp Act crisis in particular as one marked by propaganda, Adelman argues in chapter 2 that “printers found their business at the center of protests that stalled economic life in America for nearly a year in what would become the first concerted resistance to imperial policies that led to the Revolution.” Not surprisingly, “printers and their businesses also became the objects of protest, as their decisions whether to continue to print with or without stamps, became a politically charged issue” (p. 51). In the course of doing so, printers balanced “their commercial and political self-interest, their commitment to the idea of a free press, and their sense of printing as a public service” (p. 52). Adelman argues persuasively that we cannot understand the public debate about the Stamp Act without also understanding the business of printing. One of his more revealing points is that printers viewed the Stamp Act as a potential moneymaker, as many tried to drum up additional business by reprinting “the Stamp Act as a cheap pamphlet” and discussing the act of Parliament in popular material texts such as almanacs (p. 53). Adelman concludes that the Stamp Act forever changed printers’ relationship to politics. “Printers were slow to forget the Stamp Act crisis,” he writes, as they reconciled “their commercial interests with the political concerns that guided them and their readers” while also building “alliances and channels of communication that began to align printers with political leaders” (pp. 79, 80).

“By the time Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773,” Adelman writes at the outset of chapter 3, “printers had formalized a set of connections with protest leaders and extralegal groups that circulated political news throughout the colonies in newspapers, pamphlets, and other forms of print” (p. 81). The years between 1767 and 1773 proved to be an important stretch, as printers developed “political communication networks” throughout the continent (p. 112). Central to this transformation was John Dickinson's Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, the rise of the committees of correspondence, and the crisis surrounding the Tea Act of 1773. “Printers circulated Dickinson's essays throughout North America,” an effort that took shape in “overlapping circuits of oral, manuscript, and print communication, as the publication of the letters sparked town meetings, correspondence, and printed replies” (p. 91). Beyond this, printers sought to create new connections with influential people and groups, including elected officials and extralegal bodies such as the committees of correspondence. The committees of correspondence, in turn, took advantage of their relationships with politically minded printers, publishing letters and essays in local newspapers. This kind of cooperation and mobilization, in print, was fully realized in the campaigns against the 1773 Tea Act, as “these protests would prove in many ways to be the climax of printers’ efforts to create an effective communications infrastructure for the circulation of political news in a local and intercolonial context” (p. 99).

In chapter 4, Adelman discusses how printers “used their publications, as they had in the past, to protest” while also pointing to how “patriot leaders began to use their own connections to support printers’ business efforts” (p. 114). Yet, at the same time, business proceeded as usual for many after 1773, even as the imperial crisis dominated the news. Political rhetoric, Adelman insists, “stimulated the commercial ambitions of printers, who developed protonationalist aspirations for their publications” (p. 116). At the heart of this chapter is the battle to control how information circulated in the British North American colonies via the post office. Adelman focuses on Philadelphia's William Goddard and his crusade to establish a North American post office independent of Great Britain, a strategy that coincided with efforts by the Boston Committee of Correspondence “to mobilize commercial towns on behalf of intercolonial resistance to imperial policies” (p. 121). And as the imperial crisis erupted into warfare, printers played an important role in getting news of battles out to readers with “exceptional rapidity” (p. 132).

Chapter 5 traces the difficulties printers faced during the Revolutionary War. “After more than a decade of growth and increasing entanglement among printers as their networks evolved from commercial lifelines to the pathways of political protest,” Adelman writes, “the fissures of the war dispersed printers geographically and cut them off from their networks” (p. 139). Despite these hardships, which included a dearth of much-needed supplies and disruptions in their networks, printers “remained central not only to keeping lines of communication open among governments, armies, and civilians but also in shaping public opinion about the central ideological issues of the war, the outcomes of battles, and the meaning of events affecting the war in North America and throughout the Atlantic world” (p. 139). Adelman points out, however, that economic concerns often trumped politics, as keeping shops open was of paramount concern for printers, even those dislocated from their hometowns. No matter where they ended up during the war, printers struggled to get their hands on supplies, especially paper, not least because “production of paper in North America collapsed during the Revolutionary War,” a crisis compounded by an inability to no longer reliably purchase paper from Europe (p. 156). Yet Adelman suggests that the lack of ink and paper paled in comparison to the chaos caused by the movement of British and American forces. Adelman also touches on the threat of violence loyalist printers faced during the war, in particular, harassment at the hands of Patriot vigilantes.

In the sixth chapter, Adelman discusses how printers rebuilt “their trade in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War,” revealing how they had to “overcome the strong headwinds of a struggling economy as well as the continuing difficulties of operating a printing office that could sustain a family” (p. 172). We also learn how in the 1780s rural printers struggled to make ends meet while urban printers aspired to expand the scope of their papers to satisfy a growing population with an insatiable appetite for news. The shortage of available, and qualified, printers led many towns, large and small, to openly contemplate employing former loyalist printers such as James Rivington and Hugh Gaine—a thought that would have been unimaginable during the war. In contrast, printers working in rapidly growing coastal cities struggled to keep up with a constant demand for news and information, leading several printers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston to begin printing daily newspapers.

Adelman concludes Revolutionary Networks by walking us through ways in which printers approached the 1787 ratification debates. Despite the importance of the debates that took place in the states, Adelman points out, stories failed to garner much national attention and instead remained local affairs. Unlike Dickinson's Pennsylvania farmer letters, which achieved wide circulation in 1767 and 1768, “very few of the essay series published about the Constitution circulated that widely” (p. 198). While most printers were steadfastly Federalist in their politics, they tried to remain as impartial as possible, as “nearly every printer in the United States continued to assert his or her commitment to a ‘free and open press’” (pp. 198–99).

Revolutionary Networks is an impressively researched and engagingly written book that is filled with lively sketches of printers and how they experienced the American imperial crisis and the war that followed. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the American Revolution by revealing the complexities of the eighteenth-century printing trade and the ways that printers used their commercial networks to shape the politics of the day. Revolutionary Networks is a must-read for scholars interested in the imperial crisis and the history of print and media and for business historians interested in the dissemination of information.