venture into Scottish law themselves. They did so in earnest in 1743, prosecuting twenty-four Scottish reprinters, including the principals in both major cities, for seven titles. They ended up focusing on one in particular: Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopedia, a key work of the early Enlightenment and the inspiration for Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie. The Londoners were led, somewhat ironically, by an expatriate Scot, Andrew Millar. Millar knew the proprieties of both sides well. Originally apprenticed to an Edinburgh bookseller, he had actually defended the Scottish reprinting of English Bibles in a piracy trial in 1727, only to take over his erstwhile master's London outpost and become a leading copy owner. And he continued to cooperate with Scottish booksellers in undertaking new works, even while leading his campaign against reprints.24 As Millar knew, the case would have to be made circumspectly. Precedents drawn from English customs before 1707 carried no weight in Scotland, and there was precious little evidence to suggest that anything like a commonlaw right had ever obtained there. His side therefore phrased its plea carefully. But their antagonists responded fiercely. They did not rest content with court arguments, but, claiming the issue was one of national economic and cultural survival, appealed directly to readers through the newspaper press. The titles they reprinted were in truth open to all, they insisted, and their enterprise was vital to the future of Scotland, and for that matter Britain. Henry Home-later Lord Karnes, one of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment- took up the cudgels too from the bench. Home announced that Millar wanted to "crush this Manufacture in the Bud" before it could develop an export market in the colonies. He proceeded to use the case to question the political economy of the British Empire itself. If the Londoners won their case for literary property, Home insinuated, then Scotland's book trade would be relegated to a colonial status. The real English plan was to "inslave" Scottish booksellers by restricting them to mere printing and retailing-the fate of the majority of London's bookmen. That would have disastrous effects for enlightenment. With superb irony, he singled out as an example of those effects one of the works cited by the Londoners in their complaint- a Gardeners Dictionary originally published in two folio volumes. Only in its cheap and portable Scottish reprint could any real gardener hope to use the book.25 Faced with such highly charged responses, the Londoners resoundingly lost their case. They appealed to the House of Lords, expecting a friendlier hearing in Westminster. But when Lord Hardwicke voiced his own sentiment that the Act of Anne had really created "a general standing Patent" for books, the booksellers saw the wisdom of discretion and opted not to press the issue.26
Edinburgh's "pirates" had won a major victory In Scotland, at least, an open-ended right to copies definitively did not exist. The 1710 statute was still in effect there, but this outcome left the Scots free to reprint anyworks falling outside its terms of protection. True, they could not send them into England without provoking injunctions and perhaps prosecutions under English law. But they could sell to their own countrymen, and to the colonies too-and the Scots did both with alacrity. From the mid-1740s, exports from Glasgow to America rivaled those from London. David Hall in Philadelphia told Strahan in 1752 that he encountered "a great many Books imported from Ireland and Scotland," and that they came to him "much cheaper than from England." Edinburgh booksellers also exported to the south and east, to Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and Spain. And they exchanged their reprints for valued European volumes at the great continental fairs, establishing an all-important circulation of knowledge between Scotland and the Continent. Works of medicine went one way, titles by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Pascal came back, and reprinting facilitated both.27 Meanwhile, the