The news connects individuals and communities across space at certain moments in time. One need only think back to recent events like the Arab Spring, the Refugee Crisis, or COVID to find striking examples of this fact. But the news also divides us, something that is made abundantly clear by the current discourse surrounding American politics in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election. This ability to spread information and disinformation, fact and fiction, and to unite and divide political communities can be traced back to the beginnings of news media, but in the eighteenth century significant developments occurred that increased not only the reach of the news, but also its power to bring people together and drive them apart.

At this time, news coverage of popular protests and revolutionary action began to pull wider parts of the population into politics in a number of different contexts in the Atlantic world. By publicizing political action taken by ordinary people the news increased the power of publicity as a political force and began to change human behaviour. My recently published article, ‘The Imperial Public Sphere: The Press, Publicity, and the Destabilization of the British Empire, c. 1695-1765’, was born out of the desire to show how the news and publicity interacted in this way to destabilize the British Empire. The PhD project from which it emerged also traced the outcomes of this destabilization through the years of the American Revolution, but these outcomes will be discussed in more detail in the book I am currently writing.

In the article, I argue that the concept of an ‘imperial public sphere’ can help us better understand the imperial crisis that engulfed the British Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century and kicked off an Age of Revolutions. It is high time we move beyond an ideal case public sphere that was set out in national terms and ask new questions about the imperial transformations of the public sphere. The news is the vehicle through which this becomes possible, in the sense that it allows us to recover another transitional phase in the formation of the British Empire.

Colonial peoples were always being shaped as imperial and local subjects by the institutions and law-making bodies of empire. The British Parliament on the one hand, and their own colonial parliaments and assemblies on the other. As imperial subjects they accepted, responded to, debated, and at times resisted laws passed by parliament in public ways, and in doing so, they constituted and acted within an imperial public sphere. But the development of a political press in settings like Ireland and the American colonies reveals how local public spheres were also taking shape, and how colonial institutions and political cultures were beginning to exert a stronger pull on those communities living beyond the realm. The metropolitan political news that dominated newspapers printed in cities like Dublin, Belfast, Cork, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the first half of the century was increasingly joined by local political news as time wore on. In this way, we can trace the evolution of imperial and local public spheres through which new and wider publics came to debate what empire should look like.

Newspaper coverage of events such as the Money Bill Dispute in Ireland in the 1750s and the Stamp Act Crisis in the American colonies in 1760s reveals how the colonial press was now inviting people in cities and towns across the empire to read, discuss, debate, and protest against, imperial policy and acts of legislation passed by the British Parliament in London. In these instances, colonial resistance caused the British Parliament to reverse course and repeal laws or take different action. The successful defence of the local autonomy of colonial representative institutions raised questions about where sovereignty was ultimately located in the developing imperial state, and how power could be shared between imperial and colonial forms of government. By publicizing the action that political communities were taking against empire the news foregrounded these questions and in this way contributed to the destabilization of the British Empire and the escalation of the imperial crisis.

The article gets us to this point of destabilization, but the usefulness of the imperial public sphere model is not limited to explaining the roots and causes of the imperial crisis. It can also be used to shed light on the revolutionary outcomes that followed and further experiments in shared sovereignty in the British Empire. In other forthcoming work I’ll discuss the cases of Ireland and the American colonies, and eventually United States, but what about other imperial contexts? Did the imperial public sphere stretch to the Pacific despite the glacial flow of information to the far reaches of empire? Further news and media transformations like the invention of the telegraph might have made this more of a possibility over time. Could the imperial public sphere be used to illuminate more recent political transformations – decolonization and the formation of the Commonwealth for example? Whatever the case, it is clear that the news is integral to rediscovering imperial transformations that were covered over by the emergence of the nation-state and the many national accounts of the development of press and public sphere that followed. The news connected and divided empires and political communities in the past and it continues to do so today.

The Imperial Public Sphere: The Press, Publicity, and the Destabilization of the British Empire, c. 1695–1765 by Joel Herman