Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [190]
Only one of these two forms of piracy could survive. The other would be identified forever as outlawry, and consigned to a discarded stage of historical development. In the 184os-188os which would suffer that fate remained an open question. The answer, in the view of many in Philadelphia and places like the Lehigh Valley, would determine the fate of modern civilization. It was alsowhat lay at the root ofCarey's angryperformance at Appleton's publishing house.
For the publishing industry was one place where Carey's social cosmology took effect. It provided a key measure of civilization, for example. He tracked the decline of association in Spain in terms of the falling number of presses in operation.49 Similarly, he repeatedly employed a simple diagram (fig. 11.3) to display his core argument about the United States. It represented a schematic cross-section of North America, running from the Rockies to Massachusetts, with paper and rag prices forming its vertical axis. This stark pair of lines, indicating the convergence of prices between raw and finished materials, mapped the impact of association and thus represented an index of civilization. Moreover, he conceived of the book trade in general as the ultimate solvent of his societal battery"a body of conductors of an electric forcewhose action becomes more and more intense as societary positives and negatives, producers and consumers, are brought into closer relations each with every other." Withdraw printers and publishers, and circulation would cease, with the calamitous results visible in Ireland after Union. Careyurged any reader curious about what societary science might be to watch the movements bywhich people manufactured a newspaper.
That there maybe progress, there must be motion. Motion is itself a result of the incessant decomposition and recomposition of matter, and the work of association is but the incessant decomposition and recomposition of the various human forces. In a heap of penny newspapers we find portions of the labor of thousands of persons, from the miners of ores and coal and the collectors of rags, to the makers of types and paper, the engine-makers and engineer, the compositor, pressman, writer, editor, and proprietor, and finally the boys by whom they are distributed; this exchange of services going on from day to day throughout the year, each contributor to the work receiving his share of the pay, and each reader of the paper receiving his share of the work.50
FIGURE II.3. Carey's diagram of America. Carey, Principles of. SocialScience, V01- 3, 94. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library
Similarly, the book trades exhibited the importance of juxtaposition. A printer who worked for a publisher was not free, because the latter intervened before the public, while bookbinders, of all people, endured "the nearest approach to serfdom that I know to exist in civilized life." "Precisely so is it with nations," Carey promptly added. A colony's predicament was "precisely that of the printers." 51
Carey's accounts of Ireland displayed the real implications of this. The island's briefperiod of legislative independence in the eighteenth century had allowed it to impose protective tariffs, he observed. That had been the great period of prosperity for what the British had denounced as its piratical book trade. It had also been a period marked by "development of the intellectual faculties," as vouched for by the fact that "the demand for books for Ireland was so great as to warrant the republication of a large portion of those produced in England." In other words, eighteenthcentury Irish piracy had been the measure as well as the source of public knowledge. But British centralization had decreed