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NATIONS AND COMBINATIONS

The new statute protected books already published for twenty-one years. In 1731 its protection therefore expired for these works. They were the mainstays of the tradethe prized copies of the London grandees. Steady sellers like Milton, Shakespeare, and The whole duty of man suddenly fell out of the statutory fold. It was now, therefore, that those ambiguities in the law took on practical significance. According to the grandees, the end of the statutory term ought not to matter very much. Accustomed to the security of congers and trade sales, they felt that the statute simply provided an enforcement mechanism for what were inherently perpetual properties, created in each case by the act of authorship and sanctioned in general by time-honored customs. Their rivals, however- of whom many more had arisen since 1695 - saw things differently. Believing these titles to be fair game, they began to reprint them and to sell them at devastatingly cheap prices.

The Londoners had ways of dealing with local "pirates," or at least of living with them. They could usually be stopped by injunctions in Chan- ceryii Far more troubling were a new cadre of pirates from further afield, operating in a place where Chancery's writ did not run. England and Scotland had united into one nation only in 1707, and they retained separate legal systems. The union had been attended by bitter dissent from the start, and remained controversial among Scots." Central to their concerns were manufacturing and commerce. Contemporary doctrines of political economy mandated protective measures against the manufacturing ambitions of rival nations. But Scotland and England were now parts of the same nation, so the Scots demanded that London should endorse printing and publishing in their major cities. But ambitious booksellers in both Edinburgh and Glasgow aimed not only at domestic readers, but at lucrative export markets in provincial England and the American colonies. It was in this context that Scottish reprinting became the flash point of a major struggle.

Piracy therefore became entangled with the peculiar politics of a composite nation. For authorial property to become secure would require coherent answers to questions about metropolis and province, and about kingdom and colony-questions that had already been a major cause of contention in the civil war and revolution.13 And at the same time it would involve defining the public sphere that ideally traversed these spaces. The Scots defended reprinting as contributing to manufactures north of the border, and as cocking a snook at London's assumption of imperial centrality. Countless advertisements appeared in Scottish newspapers to this effect. And in challenging English "monopolists," they claimed, Scotland's printers and booksellers were advancing the cause of learning. As the Glaswegian printer Robert Foulis declared in 1754 when challenged over reprinting Pope, "I act from principle." Noting with bemusement "the new doctrine" of an authorial property that was prior to all laws, eternal, and illimitable by even the highest "national authority," Foulis insisted that "the most Learned and worthy men in this country, think we do public service in reprinting."14 In such rhetoric one can see the inauguration of a sustained polemic about print and authorship, certainly, but also about mercantilism and free trade, public knowledge, and the identity of Britain.

Adam Smith, who grew up amid these controversies, declared that "the sole engine of the mercantile system" was monopoly'5 The reprinters agreed wholeheartedly. They saw themselves as resisting a gang of outand-out monopolists. The London copy-owning elite laid claim to all works that had ever been printed in England, they noted, excepting only Latin and Greek classics. That looked to them like an attempt to monopolize the book itself. The fact that the Londoners had taken to arguing their case on the basis of a natural-and hence not only perpetual, but universal-right only made their presumption all