A different view on the "print revolution"

It's really fascinating to me how I never bothered to really interrogate the narrative of the so-called "print revolution" before reading Starr's first chapter--the relationship between the development of print and the subsequent democratization of both religion and politics (reinforced by Briggs and Burke, at least in the general gist even though they complicate the sense of urgency typically associated with the word "revolution") always seemed to make sense to me until now; I never once thought to ask "where was the state in all of this?" The answer that Starr provides presents us with a view of the development of print culture and print capitalism that I think adds some interesting complications to descriptions of the same historical narrative by both Anderson and Briggs and Burke--descriptions where the consequences of state intervention and control so central to Starr's analysis are noticeably absent.

As a quick for instance, Starr writes that "when newspapers first appeared, they were heavily censored, if not shut down entirely; those that were permitted to develop were primarily court gazettes, founded to monopolize the news and to report and celebrate the ceremonial life of the court" (33). What an interesting addition to our discussion--through Anderson--of the role of newspapers and print media in the imagining of national identity! I'm almost tempted to say that looking at early newspapers in this way almost precludes Anderson's argument; while I still really want to latch on to his idea of newspaper readers imagining themselves as part of a broader community of readership, Starr leaves me not abandoning that notion but really somewhat skeptical of it. Since the newspapers were aligned with the state and state aims of censorship, doesn't it follow that the content of these papers forced a certain authorized imagined identity on readers? I guess the argument could be made that content matters less than the other factors Anderson brings up as contributing to the imagined community of fellow readers (linguistic uniformity, near synchronous experiences of reading, etc.), but I'm not sure I'm convinced.