By deeds of stealth: English books abroad in the mid-eighteenth century

Abstract

This essay describes the efforts of Thomas Hollis (1720–1774), a Dissenter of sometimes radical inclination, who sent thousands of English books abroad anonymously in an attempt to influence political attitudes in countries throughout Europe and in the American colonies. He designed, published, inscribed, annotated and distributed these books, decorated with a complex assortment of emblems intended to convey political, civic and moral messages and allegiances in support of liberty and resistance to tyranny. This essay argues that Hollis’s cosmopolitanism represented an attempt to convert and bind disparate institutions and individuals to the causes extolled chiefly by seventeenth-century republican and radical English writers. The books’ design, updated from Roman originals, indicates a continuity from Roman times, through Renaissance republicanism and seventeenth-century English resistance, to contemporary times.