“Economic, and Not Political”: The Beginnings of the Traditional Market Agreement

Speaker: Dr Hyei Jin Kim - CBCP Visiting Research Fellow

This research seminar is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

Hyei Jin's paper investigates the largely forgotten Traditional Market Agreement (TMA) which has undeniably shaped the global trade of English-language books. Established by the Publishers Association (PA) in 1947, the TMA divided the English-speaking world into British and American markets and granted British publishers the exclusive right to sell their editions across the empire (later the Commonwealth) throughout the 20^th century. This talk will discuss the role the PA played in defining and defending the empire market in the 1940s. Examining the PA’s appeals to the British wartime government to promote book exports and its quarrels with American publishers, the talk will illustrate how the PA extracted the “empire market” from the “empire”, the economic from the political, to maintain British publishers’ book exports to dominions and colonies that would soon become independent.

About our speaker: Dr Hyei Jin Kim holds a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. She researches the place of culture in international organisations such as PEN International and UNESCO and the role institutions play in structuring the international book trade. Her current project focuses on the material conditions of literature in English by examining the Traditional Market Agreement, a division of postwar Anglophone publishing territories, and its impact on literary publishing and reading.