In 1789, reflecting on the recently successful revolution that had led to the formation of the United States, the physician and historian David Ramsay claimed that “in establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to the sword” (2). The printer Isaiah Thomas seized on this remark in his 1810 book The History of Printing in America, and for over two centuries since this sentiment has remained common among both scholars and the general public: early American printers were heroes, and the revolution would have been as impossible without them as it would have been without armed soldiers.

The reality of what printers were and did, Joseph Adelman argues in this engaging and often brilliant book, is significantly more complicated than that. Many certainly were the sorts of revolutionary avatars that Ramsay and Thomas celebrated, but they were also artisans and owners of small businesses, and this was the case before, during, and after the revolution. To stay afloat, most printers relied on revenues from a variety of products, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides. Newspapers became particularly attractive because they could generate regular revenues through subscriptions and advertising sales. To cultivate and maintain these revenue streams, printers depended upon the financial support of their local publics.

In analyzing the commercial aspects of printing the news in early America, Adelman broadens our understandings of both the business of printing and the kinds of people involved in it. Throughout the book, his examples include some previous well-known figures, but Adelman also devotes significant attention to printers who have been in many ways more typical of trade and who have been mostly ignored by historians. Some of these printers were the kind of heroic Patriots that have often been recalled, but many others were Loyalists, whom Adelman estimates “formed a significant minority of the entire trade” (126) in the prerevolutionary period. Many other printers simply “ducked from political debate altogether” (3), and most “fell somewhere in the middle. At times they supported anti-imperial arguments but perhaps saw rebellion as a step too far” (3).

In showing a diverse range of early American printers and analyzing their experiences, Revolutionary Networks is in some respects not only a business history of the early American press but also an excellent social and labor history. Adelman takes us onto the shop floors and into the offices of printing businesses. The job of printing “necessitated intense manual labor, and printers clearly bore the physical marks of their work – ink-stained hands, muscle aches and pains, and a stooped posture as years of physical labor took their toll” (22). This manual labor was part of a trade that also required a great deal of organization. There is illuminating material throughout Revolutionary Networks about the process of collating and preparing the news, and we learn about the unsung tasks of maintaining a printing business, such as obtaining paper and collecting subscription fees. As they developed their own businesses, aspiring printers were forced to be entrepreneurial and to move into new markets in which to open up new shops, as most early American towns lacked the commercial or subscriber base to support multiple printers. Ultimately, Adelman argues, as laborers and business owners, “printers were among the most mobile occupational groups in the colonies, perhaps second only to sailors and mariners in sojourning across numerous regions of North America and the Caribbean” (26).

Adelman's account of printers as entrepreneurial artisans is not meant to minimize their importance to the intellectual and political history of the American Revolution, but rather to demonstrate an important and less understood aspect of their achievement: as printers moved away from coastal centers, they extended professional connections with each other, and this gave structure and regularity to the networks that, as the book's title suggests, become essential to circulating revolutionary ideas and helped to consolidate a new nation-state.

There are important implications here for understanding both the revolutionary period and the subsequent history of the news business. As Adelman explores how those in the business of printing the news engaged with their readers, one can see elements of interaction between media and audiences that we typically associate with later periods. There are some particularly interesting connections between the printers of the prerevolutionary period and the era of mass circulation a century later, in the sense that the successful eighteenth-century printer was not always using a newspaper to push a particular kind of politics, but rather was trying to reach as wide an audience as possible and thus ensure that the business stayed in operation. Printers who succeeded in creating successful and sustainable businesses, Adelman argues,

These are important and provocative arguments about the relationships between printers and publics, and Revolutionary Networks does an excellent job of raising and supporting them.