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The clash over literary property occurred at a time when questions of identity and autonomy were unusually pressing in general. Factory rationality financial speculation, and machines were combining to challenge craft skill as the basis for authority in enterprises of all kinds. Materialist and deist convictions threatened to uproot clerical authority. Readers were encouraged to suppose that they constituted a public, with a reasoned voice and a legitimate power of judgment. Citizens flocked to see for themselves the powers of nature, as they were produced by virtuosic lecturers and showmen with their electrical machines, air pumps, and orreries. They paid to witness mechanical automata, too, which seemed to reproduce some of the most human capacities with unsettling fidelity Unsettling too were the conclusions they might draw from these performances about the nature of such capacities in themselves. Were emotions, expressions-even reason itself-matters of wheelwork and hydraulics? In short, the locations of knowledge, authority, and authenticity were unclear in a new way, and the very confusion was for some a commercial opportunity Out of this culture appeared a "mystery of author-craft" that was at once polite and commercial, reflective and rapacious, and inventive and piratical.'

It scarcely needs to be said that the arguments about literary property were long, intense, and finely balanced. They could have ended in many ways, or for that matter not ended at all-which, arguably, is exactly what did happen. At any rate, the copyright that descended to the modern Anglophone world was less an immanent principle of these exchanges than an outcome of them. The moment that defined that outcome came in February 1774. Large crowds gathered at the House of Lords to hear the nation's highest legal authority decide whether literary property existed or not. In the end, the Lords destroyed that property Copyright, they decided, was not a right of man at all. Indeed, it was almost the very opposite: an artifact, and one that replaced a prior right established by an author's work of creation. When a work's copyright expired, it was cast adrift. That represented a huge victory for the pirates - and, arguably, for the public to which they appealed. In terms of revolution principles, lib- ertywon out over property.

CONGERS AND COPIES

The demise of the so-called Press Act in 1695 made "piracy" legitimate. The major players of London's book trade got together to protest. In 171 0 they finally secured a new law in answer to their complaints. That statute is always represented as the world's first copyright law. But the term itself did not appear in it, and it left important questions unaddressed as to the nature of any such "right." What it did do was establish a legal focus for contests about the customs of the London trade, such that they would center on claims of property and a doctrine of copyright could indeed emerge from them. In other words, copyright may owe its distant origin to one interested party's response to piracy-or rather, to the Republica Grubstreetana, as Swift called it, in which piratical principles allegedly held sway-but it took specific shape through struggles to drive home that response.

Literary property became a highly contested principle because, prior to and largely independent of statute law, a powerful group in the book trade made it into the operating premise of London publishing. It was created and sustained as a mundane reality by alliances among this central corps of booksellers. They had a stake in keeping their projects safe, but they also believed that publishing was only a well-mannered enterprise because it rested on this principle. The alternative was the pirate realm represented by the likes of Hills, Curll, and Rayner. For this small oligarchy, therefore -numbering about twenty to thirty at any one time -conviction, interest, and everyday experience powerfully coincided to establish literary property as the keystone of publishing. That was why, when such property