SoFCB Symposium: Communication, Technology, and Environment in the Indian Ocean World

Join the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School (SoFCB) for a virtual symposium, which explores lithographic printing, and its materials and production processes in a nineteenth-century Malay world (1826-1900). The eastward diffusion of lithographic technology in the nineteenth century-specifically on a hand press-was not a clean, linear historical process. In Batavia, for instance, the earliest known lithographic hand press was initially imported by Dutch missionaries in 1826. However, technological acclimatization of lithography to indigenous Muslim sensibilities in the Malay world was a drawn-out parallel process, influenced less by literature that Protestant missionaries printed (which emulated the visual idiom of Malay manuscripts) and more by the waves of print-technological change happening in Ottoman domains, the Arabian Peninsula, and the commercial bazaars of the Indian subcontinent. This symposium aims to highlight localized innovations developed in the unique cultural environs of the Malay world, and will specifically examine methods, technical processes, and materials used in Malay lithography. This event will shed light on the actions of anonymous individuals who labored in the production of these printed objects as well as the moments in which Islamicate, Muslim-Malay, and Western traditions of bookmaking and printing dovetailed and co-existed.