Colonial Copyright, Customs, and Port Cities: Material Histories and Intellectual Property

Abstract

In the British Empire, much printed matter originated from outside the colony and was funneled through port cities, where customs checked the material to see that it was not pirated, obscene, or seditious. Customs and Excise hence became the section of the colonial state responsible for copyright. However, their task was not straightforward since officials faced a tangle of colonial, imperial, and international legislation. Unable to work out which law applied where, customs officials elaborated their own practices, which they generated from their daily routines. Any understanding of copyright hence requires a focus on the dockside politics of customs and how notions of copyright emerged from these practices. Taking southern Africa as a case study broadly representative of white settler colonies in the British Empire, the article explores the workings of customs and its implications for new interpretations of copyright.

Afterword: Translation and the Histories and Geographies of the Book

“…The close attention paid to the many wheres, and especially the local and the small-scale, is evident also in works that address issues ranging from the architecture of the print house or bookshop, 21 the topography of a given city's book trade clustered around particular quarters and streets, 22 to the positioning of the customs house on reclaimed land and the 'rampart logic of the port city' in dealing with the complexities of colonial copyright. 23 That the local is pertinent for translation is much in evidence in this Special Issue and elsewhere in translation studies. Contributors to this volume draw our attention to the need for research into a whole range of local issues from the regional contexts of theatre translation in German-speaking lands to the clustering of bookshops and print houses in specific towns and cities to the politics of localization operative in translatorial and editorial decisions.…”

Critical hydrography in the long nineteenth century

“…In her work on contemporary South Africa, Hofmeyr audaciously suggests that the endpoint of this thinking is to exceed the binary frameworks underlying anti‐colonialism or anti‐imperialism, and instead to shift to “hydrocolonialism,” a concept, theorized with Kerry Bystrom, which would connect the land‐water space of the port city with the aquatic materiality of oceanic trade, routes taken by physical books, government censorship of those books, and the myriad institutions that meet at the water's edge to monitor transoceanic crossings and adjudicate these imperial exchanges (Hofmeyr, 2013, p. 509; Bystrom & Hofmeyr, 2017, pp. 3–4; Hofmeyr, 2018, pp. 268–269, 2019, pp.…”

The Long Shadow of Fake Drugs and the Social Lives of Fake-ness

“…We also read the work of others studying the social and economic lives of fakeness in the Global South (e.g., Abbas 2008;Copeman 2018;Ferguson 2006;Hofmeyr 2018;Meyer and van der Port 2018;Taussig 1993;Wong 2013Wong , 2017.…”