My research project investigates the Traditional Market Agreement (TMA), a British publishing monopoly that divided the world into British and American markets in the 20th century. The SHARP Award enabled me to carry out initial research on, firstly, British publishers operating across Africa in the 1970s and, secondly, the relationship between British publishers in London and the British wartime government in the 1940s.

Reading

I spent two weeks at the Special Collections based at the University of Reading, consulting a selection of files from the Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) archive. My aim was to investigate how the HEB traded its original titles and negotiated reprint rights with other publishers to build up and distribute its African Writers’ Series (AWS) within Africa and beyond. In many cases, I found that the HEB divided up its publishing territories according to the usual terms of the TMA, reserving the US rights for potential American publishers. However, I realised that this division became much more complicated when I traced reprints of titles that were originally published by local publishers (that is, those not owned by British firms) and distributed by local booksellers across different African countries. Although the HEB’s business practices were undoubtedly shaped by the TMA, my research showed that the HEB often complied with local firms’ regional division of territories, agreeing not to flood selected local markets with its AWS editions until a set time had lapsed. These entangled negotiations between, for instance, the HEB, a publisher in South Africa, and a bookseller in Botswana created unexpected conflicts, revealing twists and turns of their book trade agreements. This finding has raised fresh questions about the relationship between international and regional divisions of publishing territories, and I plan to investigate this further as a case study in my project.

London

When I visited the National Archives in London, I initially set out to investigate the role of the British wartime government in shaping the book export trade and its relationship with the Publishers’ Association. Accordingly, I consulted records from the British Council and the Board of Trade, which revealed various government schemes and insightful discussions of the Book Export Scheme, but were not directly relevant to the TMA’s early formation in the 1940s. While going through the catalogue some time later, I unexpectedly encountered a set of files about the US lawsuit against the TMA from the 1970s. These files, which had been closed until the 2010s, were eye-opening as these revealed the British government’s internal discussions about this prolonged legal case and external debates with the Publishers’ Association and the US Department of Justice. My research showed that the government was closely involved in this lawsuit, attempting to mitigate the damage to the book export trade and to Anglo-American relations. I also investigated the evolution of the Consent Decree from 1974 to 1976, the process of which showcased the debates between the two governments. This was a significant finding for my project; in fact, I am currently working on an 8,000-word article that will give an overview of these debates, and I plan to submit the draft to Book History.