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By Root 1957 0

but controversial arguments in the new discipline of political economy itself, and there was nothing intrinsically impossible about any part of it.41 In the Stationers' case, it resulted in the patenting power of the Crown being expressly written into a new charter offered to a reconstituted company. There would still be a register, but its status must now be explicitly subordinated to, and dependent on, royal "bounty"-not craft custom, let alone authorial property. All talk of an authorial right disappeared. To a man, the booksellers who had opposed Atkyns were purged from the company's offices. At the height ofJames II's reign in the mid-168os, a reconstituted commerce and culture of print was in the offing-and this was part and parcel of a bid to transform a commonwealth and found an empire.

Yet the victory was short and pyrrhic. Atkyns himself was dead when it came. With James now on the throne, moreover, the beneficiaries were not the Tories, but the dissenters and Catholics whom James wanted to recruit as allies. And when James was supplanted as king in 1688 this new political economy of print was rudely demolished. The new government of William and Mary restored the old regime in the Stationers' commonwealth. With it returned the conviction that that regime enshrined a natural right of authors. Suddenly, with the political legitimacy of the new regime resting on a sacrosanct principle of property, this conviction was more useful than ever to the trade. What destroyed the absolutist culture of print in London- replacing it with a culture of authorial property that would last far longer-was not refutation, but revolution.42

The Glorious Revolution ruined the prospects for an absolutist culture of print in England. After 1688, the idea that the medium itself was the property of the Crown, which might administer it through a caste ofgentlemen patentees employing printers as their servants, came to seem outlandish. Instead, the book trade's autonomy was reinforced. The trade concentrated on rights in particular works, which a cadre of major booksellers administered as commercial speculations. And the historical tale advanced to promote the absolutist principle likewise lost what plausibility it might once have enjoyed: Corsellis was definitively supplanted by Caxton. The transformation was not inevitable - in France, a system like that advanced in the Restoration endured until the Jacobins swept it away a century later- but it was emphatic. Yet the notion ofpress-piracy survived. Scholars and Stationers alike had seen the appeal of RichardAtkyns's opportunistic coinage, or perhaps had come upon it independently, and had very quickly made it their own. The bishop of Oxford, for example, defending his nascent Oxford University Press against the London trade, reviled the Stationers en masse as "land-pirats." The Stationer John Hancock complained of "dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies." And within the Stationers' court itself, references to violators of the register as "pirates" began to appear in the 168os.' These usages only grew and propagated after 1688. The postrevolutionary generation gave the termpiracy the kind of broad, popular currency that it has enjoyed ever since. It did so because it captured important practical realities-realities that would structure the Enlightenment itself.

The Restoration alliance between Stationers' Company policing and state licensing had been based in the so-called PressAct, passed originally in 1662. In 1695 William and Mary's Parliament allowed this law to lapse. It was not the first time this had happened, but the political circumstances were different now, and the law was destined never to be revived. John Locke, whose arguments played a major role in the Commons' debates surrounding the act, repudiated it not only for imposing licensing-which he, like Milton, saw as a legacy of popery-but for fostering monopolies for both individual booksellers and the company at large. In rejecting the statute, Parliament