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By Root 2215 0

ofprint. Someone- typically a bookseller-who wanted to publish a book and was worried about the possibility of a rival trying to print the same work would come to Stationers' Hall and make an entry in the register. This act affirmed a claim to the work, such that nobody else should publish another edition of it. A court of fellow booksellers and printers met regularly in the formal part of the Hall to uphold its authority, which therefore extended, in principle at least, across the literary landscape of the metropolis. In time, entries in the register, dated, guarded, and securely preserved, became tantamount to records of properties. Their importance explains why this volume and its fellows have survived cataclysms like the Fire of London. When copyright eventually came into existence, it did so from a desire to continue this practice and provide it with legal confirmation.

But in the seventeenth century the practice itselfwas intensely controversial. Some believed it represented an ambition by this community of traders in knowledge to establish its own code of conduct, independent and in defiance of the state itself. Claiming a prerogative to create and defend property in works of culture required denying that prerogative to the king. In a time of deep and well-warranted anxiety about the bloody effects of printed politics, that implication could not go unchallenged. The keystone of order in the realm of publishing therefore came under attack, inwhat became aprofound and far-reaching debate about thevery nature of print and its cultural powers.

The contest came at a turning point in European history. It was a time in which medieval forms of politics and culture were being confronted by newer, potentially revolutionary alternatives. A public sphere was coming into existence, based in the proliferation of print. Experimental philosophy was inaugurating what would become modern science, and a mercantile expansion was under way that would trigger the emergence of capitalist economies and commercial empires. Not least-and not coincidentally-the golden age of Caribbean buccaneering was about to begin: the era of Blackbeard and Mary Bonney, of William Dampier and Captain Kidd. Major historical currents, critical to the development of modernity, converged on the book that still sits quietly in its chamber just down the road from St. Paul's. When they did, they ignited a furious and fundamental conflict about politics, property, and print. Its consequences are still with us. The concept of piracy was one of them.

ARTISANS AND INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

In declaring that piracy was an invention of the seventeenth century, I do not mean to imply that the misappropriation of intellectual creations itself was anything new in that period, nor that it was regarded with indifference before then. It is easy enough to find complaints of intellectual misappropriation as far back as the ancient world. Galen inveighed against suppositious books attributed to him, and Quintilian bemoaned the unauthorized circulation of his rhetorical works. Vitruvius likewise assailed would-be authors who would "steal" the writings of others in order to pass them off as their own, and recommended that they "should even be prosecuted as criminals." But these acts never seem to have been called piracies, and, Vitruvius notwithstanding, they were not legal offenses. Moreover, the contexts in which they occurred lent them very different connotations from the practices that, beginning in the seventeenth century, would be grouped together as piratical. Not only was there no conception of copyright or anything resembling it; when authors expressed distaste for misappropriation, it was sometimes on other grounds entirely. They certainly might object that it misrepresented their opinions, but they also might say that it encroached on the freedom of a citizen, or that it robbed earlier, perhaps heroic or mythical, authors of the appreciation due to them from pious readers. The combination of commercial and cultural ingredients that would produce a concept of piracy did