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By Root 2180 0

aspect to it. He was associating the very leaders of the book trade, not with the small-time pirate encountered by Alexander, but with Alexander himself. Like him, theywere apparently brigands on the grandest scale: men whose ambition had broken free of the bounds of civility and the commonwealth, andwere intent on subjecting "the whole World" -which is to say, culture in general- to their interests. This was the real difference between press pirates and brewer pirates. Because of the nature of what they stole -potentially any and all culture -printing pirates robbed the world itself. No brewer's community could do that. And that was why he wanted to see the outright eradication of the Stationer from the social world. The realm of print that the Stationer had created was, Atkyns declared, intrinsically piratical. He wanted a war on the pirates to be launched on London's own streets.

In opposing Atkyns, the copy-owning booksellers had to develop a similarly sweeping counterargument. They soon did so, and in a way that had lasting consequences. In brief, the booksellers responded to his call for their destruction by inventing a central role for authorial property. They announced that they were essential intermediaries between civility and commerce, vital if polite gentilitywere to disperse itself without corruption. Gentlemen could achieve authorship with minimal compromise to their freedom onlywith some such mediating figure to help. The lynchpin of this, they declared, was the principle of property. The author of any "Manuscript or copy" had, they said, "as good right thereunto, as any Man hath to the Estate wherein he has the most absolute property." This right was then sold to the bookseller, who registered it at Stationers' Hall. There it would be preserved in perpetuity-thanks to the booksellers' policing. This may be the earliest explicit articulation of the idea of literary property-of an absolute right generated by authorship, which could serve as the cornerstone of an entire moral and economic system of print. Certainly, the idea had no clear precedent behind it. It was nowhere referred to in the company's own founding documents, nor in the centurylong record of negotiations at its court, nor in the broader legal arena. Only with a lot of interpretive work could it be said to exist implicitly in the practice of registration, not least because authors were rarely the beneficiaries of that practice. Our own familiarity with the notion of authorial property notwithstanding, it was just as inventive at the time as anythingAtkyns was proposing. And in fact there is precious little evidence that it enjoyed any great appeal.40 Authorial property and piracy were thus being forged in contest with each other. Each rested on highly contentious grounds, and neither was intrinsically credible. It was the concept of piracy that sparked the articulation of a principle of literary property, moreover, and not vice versa.

In the short term, Atkyns won. The government revoked the company's charter. And this was a key part of a much greater policy: a programmatic campaign to remodel England's political and commercial institutions. Across the country, town and trade corporations of all kinds were soon being reconstituted. On an altogether grander scale, James I I at the same time pursued a quite deliberate policy overseas in alliance with grandees in the East India Company, aimed at making international trade a branch of the same absolutist political economy. James's notion was that monopolist trade carried out on the basis of royal privileges by the East India Company, the Royal African Company, and other corporations, would create a caste of merchants whose interests would lie with a strong monarchy. The merchant patentees would create a tributary empire and fund the monarchy sufficiently that it would become independent of parliamentary taxation. This endeavor meant that Atkyns's arguments fitted rather neatly into a grand strategy for creating a new, absolutist English state with global ambitions. It was well supported by contemporary