Victoria Gardner
Wellington College, Berkshire, History, Faculty Member
- Business History, Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Early Modern Britain, THE ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN INNOVATION, English Local History, Eighteenth Century Print Culture, and 10 moreECONOMICS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP, Eighteenth Century Trade, History of Journalism, History, Book History, European History, Book trade History, Media History, Journalism History, and British and Irish Historyedit
- My research interests lie in the intersections between economics and culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular I work on the relationship between the development and impact of communications. My work explores the emergence of communications networks (print, press, post ... moreMy research interests lie in the intersections between economics and culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular I work on the relationship between the development and impact of communications.
My work explores the emergence of communications networks (print, press, post and transport networks), the economic structures underpinning them and the role of individuals and groups in sustaining and promoting them.
Connected to this, my work considers the effects of that infrastructure – how competition in the newspaper trade shaped cooperative networks and as a result, shaped news content, direction of news and information flow, and ultimately notions of identity and belonging; how the financial success of the trade and occupational cohesion enabled the rise of the Fourth Estate with power over politicians; and how communications networks shaped emotional responses to knowledge and information acquisition and loss.
My most recent project has explored the business of news during a critical period of press politicisation, as Britain confronted foreign wars and revolutions that disrupted domestic governance (1760–1820). Britain has a precociously commercial newspaper press, having been dependent upon advertising revenues from 1712, when the first Stamp Act was instituted. Considering the political economy of news, my work determines that first, each local newspaper within the national news web was the result of dense social, material and economic relations. Newspaper owners were tradesmen and women who were part of the local community; they were friends, and socialised and did business with, many of their readers. They were also dependent upon local advertisers and often had powerful local patrons. All of these people had the power to inform a newspaper’s content and politics. Second, nationally, strengthening networks and cooperation across the trade – in part caused by competition from the London press – created a national newspaper industry and irrevocably changed the dynamics of power in the press-politics nexus.
My new work seeks to explore the relationship between communications and culture, and especially emotion. It focuses on the expansion of communications networks over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Britons became connected as never before. It questions whether communications were socially beneficial by considering contemporaries’ responses to knowledge and information acquisition and loss. In particular it considers how communications destabilized contemporaries’ sense of self and atomized communities.edit