¹ Whereas most figures are referred to by their last name, for familial clarity, Lewis and Amelia Evans will either be referred to by their first or full names.

² Amelia Evans Barry, “Letter From Amelia Evans to Benjamin Franklin, December 7, 1781,” Founders Online National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-36-02-0139 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original Source: Barbara B. Oberg, ed. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 32, March 1 through June 30, 1780 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

³ Quotation from Lewis Evans, “Letter from Lewis Evans to Robert Dodsley, January 25, 1756.” The original copy of this letter is in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Thank you to Lara Szypszak for her help with this source. See also: Garrison, Hazel Shields, “Notes and Documents: Letter of Lewis Evans, January 25, 1756,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 59 (1935): 295–303Google Scholar.

⁴ “Text” is used in this article as an umbrella term for written and visual works, implying expressions that took the form of books and prints. See: Kelly, Catherine E. and Hackel, Heidi Brayman, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 6Google Scholar. Textual property, rather than the use of the historical term “literary property,” is an extension of this usage and attempts to avoid the issue of whether a work would qualify under eighteenth-century law.

⁵ See: Lawrence Henry Gipson, Lewis Evans; To Which is Added Evans' A Brief Account of Pennsylvania, Together With Facsimiles of his Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays, Numbers I and II, Also Facsimiles of Evans' Maps (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1939); Henry Stevens, Lewis Evans, His Map of the Middle British Colonies in America; a Comparative Account of Eighteen Different Editions Published Between 1755 and 1814 Together with Some Notes Descriptive of His Earlier Map of 1749, Third Edition (London: H. Stevens, son and Stiles, 1924); Brückner, Martin, “The Ambulatory Map: Commodity, Mobility, and Visualcy in Eighteenth-Century Colonial America,” Winterthur Portfolio. 45 (2011): 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2017); “The Material Map: Lewis Evans and Cartographic Consumer Culture, 1750–1775.” Common-Place 8 (2008); Hallock, Thomas, “Between Accommodation and Usurpation: Lewis Evans, Geography, and the Iroquois-British Frontier, 1743–1784,” American Studies. 44 (2003): 121–46Google Scholar; Klinefelter, Walter, Lewis Evans and His Maps (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Harley, J.B., The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ See: Neilson, Laura Beth, License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6–7Google Scholar. For a definition of legal consciousness and its different forms, approaches, and schools, see: Chua, Lynette J. and Engel, David M., “Legal Consciousness Reconsidered,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science. 15 (2019): 335–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have applied this concept specifically to the colonial American context in relation to copyright by also considering John Feather's guidance to not “confine ourselves to a narrowly legalistic understanding of copyright” alongside later, nineteenth century studies of trade courtesy as extra-legal, widespread approaches to copyright. See: Feather, John, “The Significance of Copyright History for Publishing History and Historians,” in Privileges and Property (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), 364Google Scholar; and Spoo, Robert, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5Google Scholar.

⁷ Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 68, 11Google Scholar. See also: Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Beacon Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Fuentes, Marisa J., Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Johnson, Jessica Marie, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While these are not studies of intellectual property, they are essential for understanding methods of archival recovery.

⁸ For treatments of the intellectual property clause in the Constitution and The Copyright Act of 1790, see: Bracha, Oren, Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bugbee., Bruce Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law (Washington DC: Public Affairs Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

⁹ Rose, Mark, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Bracha also describes this as the “literary property debate,” in which there were a “series of legal disputes and public deliberations that stretches over four decades of the eighteenth century and revolved around the question of common law copyright.” Bracha, Owning Ideas, 39.

¹⁰ Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 286Google Scholar. See also: Smith, Barbara Clark, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York: The New Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Burset, Christian R., “Why Didn't the Common Law Follow the Flag?” Virginia Law Review. 105 (2019): 483–542Google Scholar; and Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22Google Scholar.

¹¹ See: Ng, Alina, “Literary Property and Copyright,” Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property. 10 (2012): 531–77Google Scholar. See note 3 for reference to textual rather than literary property.

¹² See: William Sinclair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property” in Privileges and Property, 376. See also: Harry, Ransom, The First Copyright Statute, an Essay on “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1956).

¹³ For an account of the political context of The Statute of Anne, see: Feather, John, “The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act of 1710,” Publishing History 8 (1980): 19–44Google Scholar. Ronan Deazely, “Commentary on the Engravers' Act (1735),” ed. L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org. Source held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (hereafter Primary Sources on Copyright).

¹⁴ Bracha, Owning Ideas, 38–39.

¹⁵ See: Gómez-Arostegui, Tomás, “Copyright at Common Law in 1774,” Connecticut Law Review. 47 (2014): 10Google Scholar. Gómez-Arostegui states that “remedies were available only if the owner had registered the book before publication.” See also: Bracha Owning Ideas, 60.

¹⁶ Robin Myers, ed., Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1554–1920: Part One: Registers of Printed Books ‘Entry’ and Legal Deposit, Reels Six and Seven. (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1985). Thank you to Ian Gadd for his generous answers to my queries on this subject. Digital resources for these records include Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive, https://www.literaryprintculture.amdigital.co.uk/ (accessed February 6, 2023) and Stationers’ Register Online, https://stationersregister.online/ (accessed February 6, 2023).

¹⁷ “Engravers' Copyright Act (parchment copy), London (1735),” Primary Sources on Copyright. Source held in the Parliamentary Archives. The full title of the law is “An Act for the Encouragement of the Arts of Designing, Engraving, and Etching Historical and Other Prints, by Vesting the Properties thereof in the Inventors and Engravers, During the Time therein Mentioned.” See: Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 102.

¹⁸ See: Isabella Alexander and Cristina S. Martinez, “The First Copyright Case under the 1735 Engravings Act: The Germination of Visual Copyright?” in Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021).

¹⁹ Mark Rose, “Technology and Copyright in 1735: The Engraver's Act,” The Information Society 21 (2005): 63.

²⁰ The development of copyright notices is part of larger controversies about British literary property in the eighteenth century. Several landmark cases, laws, and public debates focused on this issue of whether there was an inherent or natural right, which meant no notice was needed, or whether copyright was a limited right and thus needed documentation, and thus more documentation was needed. See: Isabella Alexander, “Determining Infringement in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Britain: ‘A Ticklish Job’”; and H. Tomas Gomez-Arostegui, “Equitable Infringement Remedies before 1800,” in Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law, ed. Isabella Alexander and H. Tomas Gomez-Arostegui (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016), 18. Thank you to Isabella Alexander and Christina Martinez for sharing their tremendous knowledge in response to multiple queries relating to publication lines.

²¹ The revised law was passed after Lewis's death in 1756, but was applicable to the reissued 1776 version of A General Map orchestrated by Amelia. For other contemporary examples of copyright and maps, see the digital project from Isabella Alexander, “Copyright and Cartography,” Australian Research Council, 2019, https://www.copyrightcartography.org (accessed December 10, 2022).

²² Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 97.

²³ Will Slauter shows that there were, however, repeated efforts to make information a product of intellectual work. See: Will Slauter, Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 13.

²⁴ Alexander, Isabella and Martinez, Cristina S., “A Game Map: Object of Copyright and Form of Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography 72 (2020): 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alexander and Martinez have produced groundbreaking work on the relationship between cartography and copyright in this and other publications. There have been few other scholarly treatments on this subject, with the exception of Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography; Mary Spongberg Pedley, “Privilege and Copyright,” in The History of Cartography Volume IV: Cartography in the European Enlightenment, eds. Matthew H. Edney and Mary Spongberg Pedley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1115–9; (cited elsewhere) and Hunter, David, “Copyright Protection for Engravings and Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Library. 6 (1987): 128–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ See: Lionel Bently, “The “Extraordinary Multiplicity” of Intellectual Property Laws in the British Colonies in the Nineteenth Century,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 12 (2011): 171. I thank the anonymous reviewer of Law and History Review for this recommendation.

²⁶ Michael Hattem writes that “colonists argued that their ancestors had been assured that would retain all the rights and privileges they had held in England and that they and their posterity were not to be treated differently than native-born…” See: Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 73–76, at 75. See also: Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2.

²⁷ For more on Franklin's position in the transatlantic trade, see: Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 29.

²⁸ Gipson, Lewis Evans, 5–6.

²⁹ This map was engraved by Lawrence Herbert, who garnered considerable attention in Philadelphia because of his rare ability to engrave on several types of metal. See: Walter Klinefelter, “Lewis Evans and His Maps,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 61 (1971): 20. Lewis was likely introduced to Herbert through Franklin.

³⁰ Article published October 13, 1748. See: Gipson, Lewis Evans, 17. Herbert was the artist in question, underscoring the connectivity between art and technology during this period.

³¹ Lewis Evans, A Map of Pennsilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, And the Three Delaware Counties (Philadelphia: by the author, 1755). Images of A Map of Pennsilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, And the Three Delaware Counties are digitized by and courtesy of the Library of Congress, and in the public domain. Physical copies were viewed at the Huntington Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. This map does not contain printing information, but Franklin, given his and Evans's relationship, likely published it. My research indicates that there was not a London copyright exchange, like what would later occur with A General Map.

³² Slauter, Who Owns the News?, 7.

³³ Myers, ed., Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers.

³⁴ See: Lewis Evans, A Map of Pennsilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, And the Three Delaware Counties. (Philadelphia: by the author, 1749). Map examined at the Library Company, the Society of the Cincinnati, the Huntington Library, and the Library of Congress.

³⁵ Votes and Proceedings of The House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania, Met at Philadelphia on the Fourteenth of October, Anno Domini 1748, and continued by Adjournments (Philadelphia: Printed and Sold by B. Franklin, at the New-Printing-Office, near the Market, 1749), 57. Copy viewed via America's Historical Imprints.

³⁶ Lewis Evans, Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays [The Analysis] (Philadelphia: Printed by B. Franklin, and D. Hall), 5. Evans references specific figures throughout the volume, particularly on page 10 where he mentions several people who shared information with him, along with The Eagle (italics in text).

³⁷ Evans, The Analysis, 5.

³⁸ Brückner, Social Life of Maps, 29.

³⁹ Lewis Evans, Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays: The First, Containing an Analysis of A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America; and of the Country of the Confederate Indians: a Description of the Face of the Country; the Boundaries of the Confederates; and the Maritime and Inland Navigations of the Several Rivers and Lakes Contained Therein (Philadelphia: Printed by B. Franklin, and D. Hall, 1755), iv. Copy viewed at the Huntington. The Ethyl Corporation published a book, Lewis Evans and His Historic Map of 1755 First Know Document to Show Oil at the Industry's Birthplace, to commemorate its 200th anniversary in 1955 (New York: Ethyl Corporation, 1955). Copy viewed at the Society of the Cincinnati.

⁴⁰ Patrick Spero writes, “two challenges of this period were “establishing social harmony within the empire, especially between colonists and Native Americans, and creating borders between the polities that composed the empire.” Patrick Spero, Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 2.

⁴¹ Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Another term that Hyde uses to describe “non-excludable” and “non-rivalrous” goods that occupy the public domain is “cultural commons” which is equally illuminating (ibid., at 47).

⁴² Cameron B. Strang, “Perpetual War and Natural Knowledge in the United States,” 1775–1860, Journal of the Early Republic 38 (2018): 387–413.

⁴³ Evans, A General Map of the Middle British Colonies, 1. See also: Lawrence Henry Gipson, Lewis Evans; To Which is Added Evans' A Brief Account of Pennsylvania, Together With Facsimiles of his Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays, Numbers I and II, Also Facsimiles of Evans' Maps (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1939); and Henry Stevens, Lewis Evans, His Map of the Middle British Colonies in America; a Comparative Account of Eighteen Different Editions Published Between 1755 and 1814 Together with Some Notes Descriptive of His Earlier Map of 1749, Third Edition (London: H. Stevens, son and Stiles, 1924).

⁴⁴ See: Gregory A. Waselkov, ed., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Waselkov also writes, “The ephemeral maps were a critical means of information that were “incorporated directly into French and English maps, usually enhancing their accuracy.” Gregory A. Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast,” in Waselkov, ed., Powhatan's Mantle, 435. See also: Christopher Steinke, ““Here is my country”: Too Né's Map of Lewis and Clark in the Great Plains,” The William and Mary Quarterly 71 (104): 589–610; Dave Costa, Elizabeth Ellis, George Ironstrack, Bob Morrissey, Scott Shoemaker, and Cam Shriver, “Interpretations of a Robe,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi, https://aacimotaatiiyankwi.org/myaamia-history/interpretations-of-a-robe/ (accessed February 6, 2023); and “Early Maps of the American South — Special Topics: American Indian Maps,” Research Laboratory of Archaeology, http://rla.unc.edu/emas/topics3.html (accessed December 10, 2022).

⁴⁵ Evans, A General Map of the Middle British Colonies, 1. See also: Evans, the Analysis, 10. Evans intended to write four volumes but was unable to complete them before his death. The first of the series was published in Philadelphia and London, while the second was published in London. Copies viewed at the Huntington Library . In “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” Hugh Amory writes, “Franklin's edition of Lewis Evans's Geographical Essays (1755) is an early instance of a colonial title with an alternate metropolitan imprint, for the Dodsley's in London.” Amory notes that “beginning in the 1740s, there was an ever-rising tide of intercolonial commerce in books, though their imprints fail to acknowledge it in such formulas as ‘Printed for X in Philadelphia, and are to be sold by Y in New York in and Z in Boston,’” rendering Evans’ choice with the notice of A General Map unique. Hugh Amory and David Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America in America. Volume I: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42.

⁴⁶ Evans, the Analysis, iv. Evans also writes about how “the English” were misinformed about many aspects of Native sovereignty and political practices, arguing that “all their [Indigenous] States are Republic in the strictest Sense,” 14.

⁴⁷ Evans, the Analysis 10. It is likely that Pownall and Franklin relied on A General Map for their own land speculation enterprise with the Ohio Company in May of 1770.

⁴⁸ For example, Lisa Brooks describes how Indigenous texts “arose from a utilitarian aesthetic rooted in the instrumentality of writing,” an aesthetic that would “transfer communal memory across time” and be “evaluated based on its capacity as a carrier or catalyst within the network of relations.” See: Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 220–21.

⁴⁹ Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 77. Vats extensively cites Indigenous scholars in this analysis, including Aroha Te Pareake Mead, Winona LaDuke, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith.

⁵⁰ There is perhaps an element of work-for-hire dynamics among colonial geographers and Indigenous guides, but in the absence of further study and additional evidence, this is only speculative at this time.

⁵¹ Critical race and Indigenous peoples studies from legal, literary, anthropological, and other academic approaches evaluate and theorize colonialism embedded in structures of intellectual property, and offer methodologies for reclaiming those structures. For examples, see: Trevor Reed, “Itaataatawi: Hopi Song, Intellectual Property, and Sonic Sovereignty in an Era of Settler-Colonialism” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018); Anjali Vats and Deidré A. Keller, “Critical Race IP,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 36 (2018): 735–95. While much of this work does not always stretch back to the eighteenth century, it is deeply grounded in the long history between intellectual property and systems of governance, authority, and oversight.

⁵² Hallock, “Between Accommodation and Usurpation,” 129.

⁵³ See also: James Turner, “Letter to Benjamin Franklin from James Turner, 6 July 1747,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-03-02-0065 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, January 1, 1745, through June 30, 1750, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961).

⁵⁴ John Schutz, Thomas Pownall, British Defender of American Liberty (Pasadena: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1951), 34.

⁵⁵ Lewis Evans, A General Map (Philadelphia: by the author, 1755). Images of A General Map digitized by and courtesy of the Library of Congress, and in the public domain. Physical copies viewed at the Society of the Cincinnati, the Huntington Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Antiquarian Society. Related research was also done virtually at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Thank you to each of those institutions for providing fellowship funding to spend time in the collections. Thank you to Ellen McCallister Clark for first introducing me to A General Map, and Stephanie Arias for ensuring I was able to view the map remotely over Zoom in the spring of 2021 as well as in-person at a later date at the Huntington.

⁵⁶ Burset, “Why Didn't the Common Law Follow the Flag?” 483.

⁵⁷ Evans, The Analysis, iii.

⁵⁸ Thank you to Mike McNamara who owns this map in his personal collection, and to Richard Brown for facilitating our conversation and sharing his own tremendous understanding of maps in this period. See also: Brückner, Social Life of Maps, 32.

⁵⁹ As the printer for A General Map, and a presence in Lewis's life, there was likely some degree of consensus. For Franklin's formulative experiences in the American print trade, see: James N. Green, “Part One. English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” in A History of the Book in America in America. Volume I: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 248–98.

⁶⁰ Given Franklin's early views of the colonies as a potentially unified body, Lewis's adjacent view that there would be separate spheres for textual property was in line with other elements of their partnership. Franklin himself was an expert in geographic publishing, particularly in the early example of Poor Richard's Almanac, although it lacked any form of copyright notice. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” 257.

⁶¹ Ibid., 267. Reprints ranged from exact unauthorized copies to versions altered either deliberately or through error. The Irish and American print trades effectively operated without copyright and thus unauthorized reprints of books like Pamela were functionally legal.

⁶² Leo Lamay argues in his work on Franklin that Evans “understated the size and population of the colonies in order to emphasize that there was no danger of them becoming independent” while also not so subtly warning that “repeated and continued ill Usage, Infringements of their dear-bought Privileges” could lead colonial America to do what was necessary for “their own Preservation.” See: J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 3: Soldier, Scientist, and Politician, 1748-1757 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 260.

⁶³ Evans, The Analysis, iii.

⁶⁴ Votes and Proceedings of The House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania, Met at Philadelphia on the Fourteenth of October, Anno Domini 1754, and continued by Adjournments (Philadelphia: Print and Sold by B. Franklin, at the New-Printing-Office, near the Market, 1755), 12, 183. Copy viewed at the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania Library (hereafter Kislak Center). Thank you to John Pollock for his guidance with these sources.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 7. Copy viewed at the Kislak Center.

⁶⁶ Votes and Proceedings.

⁶⁷ See: Matthew Edney, “John Mitchell's Map of North America (1755): A Study of the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Imago Mundi. 60 (2008): 63–85. See also: “Letter From Benjamin Franklin to Jared Eliot, 31 August 1755,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-0074 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: Leonard W. Labaree, ed. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, April 1, 1755, through September 30, 1756, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963).

⁶⁸ Benjamin Franklin, “Letter From Benjamin Franklin to Richard Jackson, December 12th, 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-05-02-0126 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 5, July 1, 1753, through March 31, 1755, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

⁶⁹ See: Bugbee, Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law; Rose, Authors and Owners.

⁷⁰ See: forthcoming chapter by Kyle Courtney, “Copyright and Historical Dangers of Licensing Regimes in the Digital Age,” in American Revolutions in the Digital Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024).

⁷¹ Evans, A General Map, 1.

⁷² Stevens, Evans, 13. See also: Thomas Pownall, A Topographical Description, preface; “To Benjamin Franklin from ——: The Dispute over Commissions for the Militia, January 1756,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-0163 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6. Stevens, Evans, 13.

⁷³ Ibid.

⁷⁴ A letter to the editor (or what is presented as such) critiquing Evans was signed December 1st, 1755, from “AN.” Evans’ included it in Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays. Number II. Containing A Letter, Representing the Impropriety of Sending Forces to Virginia: The Importance of Taking Frontenac; And the Preservation of Oswego was Owing General Shirley's proceeding thither. Containing Objections to those Parts of Evans’ General Map and Analysis, which relate to the French Title to the Country, on the North-West Side of St. Laurence River, between Fort Frontenac and Montreal &c. Published in the New-York Mercury, No. 178. Jan. 5, 1758. With an Answer to So much thereof as concerns the Public: And the several Articles set in a just Light. (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-mall, 1756), v. Copy viewed at the Huntington.

⁷⁵ See: Richard M. Ketchum, Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 375. See also: Stevens, Evans, 13; Mary Gwyneth Lewis, “Lewis Evans” in A Dictionary of Welsh Biography (London: Blackwell, 1959); and Joel Kovarsky, “Lewis Evans’ Map of the Middle British Colonies,” The Portolan. 92 (2015): 30–39.

⁷⁶ Amelia Evans Barry, “Receipt, February 19th, 1766,” Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 13, January 1 through December 31, 1766, Leonard W. Labaree, ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 165. Original copy at the American Philosophical Society.

⁷⁷ Garrison, “Letter of Lewis Evans,” 297.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 301. Bolded for emphasis. Underlining in image added to highlight quotation.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Whether or not this letter made it to Dodsley is also uncertain. As one of the few surviving materials in Lewis's own hand, it was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1919 with the miscellaneous papers of Caesar and Thomas Rodeny. It is unknown how this letter came to be in the family's possession, or whether it or a copy was dispatched to Dodsley.

⁸¹ Gipson, Lewis Evans, 79.

⁸² Thank you to Lauren Duval for her insights on this point.

⁸³ See: Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22Google Scholar. Benton writes, “without making claims that the politics of legal pluralism determined shifts in political economy…we can grasp through its study the intersection between major reorganizations of the plural legal order and significant changes in the distribution and definition of property rights.”

⁸⁴ Thomas Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America As Are Contained in The (Annexed) Map of the Middle British Colonies, &c, In North America. By T.Pownall, M.P., Late Governors &c of His Majesty's Provinces of Massachusetts Bay and South Carolina, and Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey (London: Print for J. Almon, opposite Burlington House, in Piccadilly, 1776), 9–10.

⁸⁵ Lewis Evans, “New York, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1659–1999,” Wills and Administrations, Volume 017, 0019–0021, 1749–1760 (New York: William Livingston, 1756), 23–24. The will is dated May 26, 1756 and the probate date is June 18, 1756. The records identify South Britain, Philadelphia, as Evans's permanent residence. Original source: New York Surrogate's Court, Wills and Administrations (New York County, New York), 1680–1804 via Ancestry.com

⁸⁶ Hoskins was a close friend of Deborah's, and Franklin was moved by the resemblance between her and one of Amelia's daughters. See: Benjamin Franklin, “From Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, September 1st, 1773,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0210 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: William B. Willcox, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 20, January 1 through December 31, 1773 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). See also: Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Thank you to Lauren Duval for this recommendation.

⁸⁷ Evans, “Wills and Probate Records,” 23.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 24.

⁸⁹ Ibid. See also: Gipson, Lewis Evans, 79.

⁹⁰ Amelia Evans, “Letter from Amelia Evans to Benjamin Franklin, March 6th, 1766,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-13-02-0060 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6.

⁹¹ References in Benjamin and Deborah Read Franklin's correspondence indicate that Amelia was close with Sally Franklin Bache during their adolescence. See: Benjamin Franklin, “From Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, 14 February 1765 (II),” Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: Labaree, Leonard W., ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 12, January 1, through December 31, 1765, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

⁹² It is unclear from the correspondence between Amelia and Franklin if these were the plates for the 1749 or the 1752 editions, or whether the same plates were used for both. Amelia Evans, “Letter from Amelia Evans to Benjamin Franklin, February 19th, 1766,” Founders Online, National Archives, Original source: Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 13, January 1 through December 31, 1766, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969).

⁹³ Amelia Evans, “Receipt, 19 February 1766,” Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 13. Original copy at the American Philosophical Society. See also: “Letter From Amelia Evans to Benjamin Franklin, February 19th, 1766,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-13-02-0037 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6.

⁹⁴ Amelia indicated to Franklin that any proceeds from A General Map would be the source of an educational fund for her children. See: Amelia Evans Barry, “To Benjamin Franklin from Amelia Barry, 31 December 1779, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-31-02-0205 (accessed February 6, 2023). Barbara B. Oberg, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 31, November 1, 1779, through February 29, 1780 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

⁹⁵ Evans Barry, “To Benjamin Franklin from Amelia Barry, 5[–30] June 1778,” 1.

⁹⁶ Amelia Evans Barry, “To Benjamin Franklin from Amelia Barry, June 5th – 30th, 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-26-02-0522 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original source: William B. Willcox, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 26, March 1 through June 30, 1778, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987).

⁹⁷ The memorandum that Franklin left with his landlady, Mrs. Stevenson, contained several requests upon his departure, including “To deliver the broad Copper Plate at the Head of the Garret Stairs to Mr. Pownall; with one of the Print.”

⁹⁸ Evans Barry, “To Benjamin Franklin from Amelia Barry, 31 December 1779,” 1.

⁹⁹ There is a rich history of women writers, printers, and literary property. See: Homestead, Melissa, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Leona Hudak's Early American Women Printers and Publishers 1639–1820 is a tremendous bibliography of women in the print trade in America (Metchen and London: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1978); however, there is not yet a book-length treatment of gender and copyright in the eighteenth century. The forthcoming volume, Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia Roman, Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women 1735–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) will in part address this.

¹⁰⁰ According to Ronan Deazley, Hogarth's Act made “explicit that anyone purchasing engraved plates ‘from the original Proprietors thereof’ was free to print and reprint from them without incurring the penalties detailed in the Act.” L. Bently and M. Kretschmer, eds., “Commentary on the Engravers' Act (1735),” eds. www.copyrighthistory.org (accessed December 10, 2022). Source held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. See also: Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography, 190. See also: Christina S. Martinez, “An Emblematic Representation of Law: Hogarth and the Engravers’ Act,” in Law and the Visual Representations, Technologies, Critique, ed. Desmond Manderson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 75–100.

¹⁰¹ Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America, v.

¹⁰² There were three known sets of plates involving A General Map in the 1770s: the Turner originals, and two others made by Thomas Jefferys and Robert Sayer. A report from the Library of Congress in 1939 cites twenty- seven editions from these three sets of plates—the original, the Jefferys, the Sayer—alone. See also: Gipson, Lewis Evans, 83. In an exchange with Pownall, Sayer claimed that he believed that he had purchased the original plates—Pownall described how a “blundering copy has, in the course of Trade, by Purchase” came to be made by Sayer—and while it is possible that Dodsley made his own plates that went to Sayer, the originals remained with Franklin and Amelia.

¹⁰³ Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America, vi.

¹⁰⁴ See: Hunter, “Copyright Protection for Engravings and Maps,” 128–47; and Pedley, Mary Sponberg, Strugnell, Anthony, and Mallinson, Jonathan, eds., The Map Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century: Letters to the London Map Sellers Jefferys and Faden (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000)Google Scholar. William Faden was Jefferys’ successor in his royal role in 1771.

¹⁰⁵ Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America, vi.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid.

¹⁰⁹ Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America, 9–10. This critique also appeared in the London Evening Post. See: Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography, 190.

¹¹⁰ Amelia Evans Barry, “Letter to Benjamin Franklin from Amelia Barry, May 1st, 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-32-02-0232 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original Source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 32. See also: Pownall, A Topographical Description of Such Parts of North America, vi; and Boyd, Anne E., ed., Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹¹ Amelia Evans Barry, “Letter From Amelia Evans to Benjamin Franklin, December 7th, 1781,” Founders Online National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-36-02-0139 (accessed February 6, 2023). Original Source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 32.

¹¹² Almon received around £300. See: Benjamin Franklin, “From Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Pownall, March 1st, 1785,” Founders Online, National Archives, Ellen R. Cohn, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 43, August 16, 1784, through March 15, 1785 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018). I thank the anonymous reviewer of Law and History Review for suggesting inclusion of this source.

¹¹³ See: [Amelia Evans Barry] Memoirs of Maria, a Persian Slave (London: printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row, 1790). Copy viewed via Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

¹¹⁴ Koehl, Hélène and Giunti, Matteo, “Amelia Evans Barry (1744–1835) ou quand Livourne décidait d'un destin de femme et d'écrivain,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi. XIV (2007): 103Google Scholar.