In a prescient essay published in 2000, the Princeton historian Robert Darnton – one of the grandees of the historical profession – proposed a new kind of history, one prompted as much by recent developments in Silicon Valley as anything gleaned in the archives. He called for ‘a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the history of communication’. This, he argued, had to be much larger than just a history of newspapers. It had to encompass how information spread by word of mouth, the places where people convened to trade it and the multiple professions engaged in its dispersal.

In the ensuing quarter-century, a select historical band has taken up this challenge – notably Andrew Pettegree in The Invention of News (2014), which focused on print and its circulation in early modern Europe. Darnton himself, in his most recent book, The Revolutionary Temper (2023), charted news networks in France in the four decades before the Revolution, and extended the analysis of what constituted ‘news’ beyond the confines of print to include manuscript letters and the multifarious forms of oral transmission: coffee-house gossip, news bulletins bawled out on street corners by pedlars and hurdy-gurdy players, the conversations at Paris’s established hubs of news exchange in the gardens of the
Luxembourg and the Palais-Royal.

Now Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange starts out from these already lofty foothills and takes his subject to further heights. The book’s ambition is prodigious. Here is an account of how news was recorded, transmitted, consumed and made sense of – one which ranges in time from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the advent of the mass-market newspaper in the early 19th century, and traverses the entire European continent, from London to Moscow. Comparative excurses take in places as far-flung as 16th-century Brazil and late Ming China (Beijing enjoyed a printed government gazette, we learn, as early as 1638).

Nor is this a story in which print is the all-dominant medium of transmission. As Raymond Wren demonstrates, organised networks of news gathering and distribution emerged in Italy well before the adoption of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1450s. Diplomats and merchants both needed accurate and timely reports of events on the notoriously volatile peninsula. News gatherers ‘bundled’ together short, paragraph-length reports from a variety of sources and locations, and circulated these in manuscript newsletters known as avvisi (‘advices’). 

Conventions of presentation were already well established by the end of the 1400s. The standard news paragraph in a hand-copied avviso informed the reader whence the news had been sent, the name and rank (or occupation) of the sender and the dates of origination and receipt. This standardisation enabled news items to be easily ‘re-bundled’, retaining the topical and deleting the disproved or out of date at each successive copying.

A series of European cities – Rome, Venice, Antwerp and Cologne – emerged as the primary centres for the compilation, copying and redistribution of news, each connected by a web of subsidiary ‘hubs’ in what grew organically into a highly efficient and eventually continent-wide network of transmission. Its lines crisscrossed most extensively in the economically advanced parts of western Europe: the swathe of territory comprising the Low Countries, France, the German territories and northern Italy, with Venice as the busiest easternmost entrepôt of news.

Although Raymond Wren’s account never directly invokes Adam Smith, the ‘pan-European communications network’ he conjures into view reveals more than a touch of the Scottish economist’s ‘invisible hand’: a service, ‘well-organized, (albeit unintentionally so)’, that came into existence to supply a market, functioned without any overarching external control and successfully evolved in response to changing social and political circumstances. 

It was also largely self-correcting. As news made its way between the various hubs of the continental network, its veracity was repeatedly reassessed. Readers became ‘resistant to the lure of … false and fake news’. Here, too, there were unseen Smithian forces at work: ‘Continuous improvisation … formulated, more unconsciously than consciously’, a series of solutions that corrected error and ‘established trust’. 

The stately pace at which most news travelled between the network’s geographical ‘nodes’ certainly helped this process. Raymond Wren’s text bristles with statistics, but his striking conclusion is how little the speed of news’s movement across Europe altered between the 15th and the early 19th centuries. At least until the coming of the railways and the electric telegraph, news travelled at the average speed of horses and ships, which meant that for most of this period it went at somewhere between 1.5 and 5kph. As late as 1815, news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo took a good three days to traverse the 329km between the battlefield and central London, at an average speed of 5kph – little different from the speed of news transmission three centuries earlier.

But if speeds were relatively constant, Raymond Wren’s story of European news is otherwise one of rapid and recurrent change. Many of these changes are already familiar, and each has its extensive scholarly literature: the advent of printing in the 1450s; the arrival of the weekly newspaper, first in Cologne and Strassburg (respectively 1592 and 1605) and thereafter in nearly every major European city (London acquired its first in 1621); the creation of government-authorised but privately run postal systems; the rise of the one-off ‘news pamphlet’ in the 17th century, polemical and opinionated in contrast to the more sober weekly news; the emergence of the coffee house as a ‘news hub’ in the 1650s; and much else. But if these themes are hardly unknown, rarely have the connections between each constituent part of the network been anatomised so surely or across so vast a geographical range. The sheer breadth and depth of Raymond Wren’s polyglot reading is formidable, and there is hardly a subject to which he does not bring fresh insight.

If these novel perspectives have a single characteristic in common, it is in Raymond Wren’s refusal to view this sequence of ‘innovations’ teleologically, as milestones along some high road to modernity. Each innovation, as it came along, became part of a far more pluralistic system, one in which the old-fashioned and new-fangled coexisted as ‘complementary modes, co-dependent and mutually supportive’.

In this vein, perhaps the most counterintuitive of his conclusions is ‘how limited the effects of newspapers were’ on the wider business of news. News weeklies and (by the 18th century) dailies were just one ingredient in a more varied ‘diet of news’ in which manuscript and oral transmission remained at least as important as print. Even as late as the mid-18th century, Raymond Wren argues, ‘newspapers influenced people less by individual reading than by working their way into conversation and social encounters’.

His boldest claim, however, and one that recurs throughout the book, is that all this writing about and relaying and conversing about the news gave rise to a sense of membership of something larger than locality or even nation: a sense of belonging to a European ‘community’. All those networks of news ‘forged a sense of connectedness, sharedness, a sense of place, a sense of community’. They ‘brought the continent together’ and this ‘commonality of news’, in turn, enabled ‘the idea of an international community to be grasped’. (Here, if nowhere else, Raymond Wren allows a development from the period 1400 to 1800 to be portrayed as a harbinger of the modern world.)

Whether Europe’s news networks fostered such a sense of incipient transnational ‘community’ is open to doubt. As our contemporary experience of social media has demonstrated all too clearly, being connected to a shared international network does not necessarily conduce to a sense of membership of a community – often the reverse. Early modern news exchange could be just as effective at promoting rancour and division, and the sense of community it engendered was just as often defined by differentness and antipathy to others as anything encouraged by Facebook or X. For much of the period between 1450 and 1750, channels that ‘buzzed’ (one of the author’s favourite words) with news also fizzed with the toxins of religious hatred. These certainly produced ‘communities’, but binary, mutually exclusive ones, in which the world divided: between the chosen and the damned, the heretic and the elect. 

It may seem ungrateful to point to any omission in a work already so generous in its range and erudition, but there is one that matters. Indeed, Raymond Wren’s foregrounding of the ‘connectedness [and] sharedness’ of this early modern European news community is only really plausible because religion, in this account, is pushed so far towards the back. Although he concedes that ‘religion was omnipresent’ during the period, we are seventy pages into the narrative before the word is even mentioned and it is thereafter a peripheral presence. It is striking, in a book which includes discussions of the flight times of carrier pigeons and the 1704 print runs of Daniel Defoe’s Review, that no space is found for perhaps the most ubiquitous and durable conduit of news communication across early modern Europe: the church pulpit. In a book of almost six hundred pages, it appears not once.

None of this, however, detracts from the scale and splendour of the book’s achievement. Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment – one that is destined to be the starting point for further investigations of how Europe received and thought about its news for many years to come.