What is at stake in exploring colonialism and print from the perspective of social history? This collection of articles shows how a social history perspective can tie together people, places, and themes that are often kept separate, opening new avenues of inquiry. As the editors argue in their introduction, by focusing on “the materiality of printing and the ground-level practices and “tactics” of production and circulation,” we can locate “histories of print within the world of comparative social analysis, rather than singularly within book, cultural, or intellectual history.” And, we might add, this in turn enables us to reach a deeper appreciation of the operation of colonial print and print’s place in the history of the modern world. In this short afterword, I would like to pull together some of the themes that stand out for me in this collection, and what they might suggest in terms of ways forward for research. My perspective is as a historian of print culture, and more particularly print media, in twentieth-century Africa.

中文翻译：

---

 后记


从社会史的角度探讨殖民主义和印刷术有何利害关系？这本文章集展示了社会历史视角如何将经常分开的人物、地点和主题联系在一起，开辟新的探究途径。正如编辑们在引言中所说，通过关注“印刷的物质性以及生产和流通的底层实践和“策略””，我们可以将“印刷史置于比较社会分析的世界中，而不是孤立地在书籍、文化或思想史上。”而且，我们可以补充一点，这反过来又使我们能够更深入地了解殖民印刷的运作以及印刷在现代世界历史中的地位。在这篇简短的后记中，我想汇集一些在这本书中对我来说突出的主题，以及它们可能对研究的前进方向提出的建议。我的观点是作为二十世纪非洲印刷文化（尤其是印刷媒体）的历史学家。