Mind the Gap: Social Networks Bridging Imperial Knowledge Deficits

Between 1870 and 1895, Australian publisher and bookseller Edward Petherick was an active fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Royal Colonial Institute, and other societies interested in or dedicated to the study and history of the British Empire. Petherick’s surviving letters to and from members of these societies, as well as correspondence with colonial, British, and European scholars, politicians, writers, and other agents, are the physical remnants of an international social network and intellectual community concerned with the history, economics, and politics of the Imperial sphere. This paper examines Petherick’s correspondence for the signs of this network and the intellectual exchanges of ideas. In particular, the paper traces Petherick’s initial involvement with the network after moving to London to become manager of Melbourne-based George Robertson’s British distribution office in 1870, the further development of his web of contacts during the writing his bibliography of Australia, and finally his later reliance on the network when he launched his international distribution company, the Colonial Booksellers’ Agency. In turn, the paper considers Petherick’s facilitation of intellectual exchanges regarding scholars and politicians interested in researching the colonies, as well as British and colonial publishers and authors who wanted access to each other’s markets. Petherick was a nexus, a means of connection, in the network. Moreover, his letters illustrate how agents generally helped one another to overcome knowledge deficits and to understand the complex and changing relationship between Britain and the colonies.