ABSTRACT
In 1906, Charles H. Kerr of Chicago published what they claimed was the rst ‘American edition’ of the rst volume of Karl Marx’s Capital. However, the sale and reading of ‘American editions’ was not limited to ‘American readers’. Despite being a relatively small Chicago-based radical publishing co-operative, Kerr & Co. was central to the distribution of Marx’s Capital in Britain in the early twentieth century, amongst many other Marxist titles. Several autobiographies of prominent gures in the British labour movement testify to the centrality of Kerr & Co. books to their Marxist learning and claim that groups of workers clubbed their wages together to buy shares in the company and buy books in bulk. Books published by Kerr became required reading for a generation of Marxist autodidacts. This essay uses the original stock certicates of Kerr & Co. to identify its British shareholders. It investigates what business transactions between Kerr and British labour organizations, as well as individual readers, reveals about the diffusion of English-language Marxist literature and communications between British and American radical socialists. These archives, held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, contain evidence of the lengths that their British customers went to in order to obtain Marxist literature and invest in radical publishing in the rst few decades of the twentieth century. These transatlantic transactions have been largely neglected by historians of both British Marxism and Kerr & Co.1 Most studies of British Marxism that focus on its international dimensions have understandably concentrated on the relationship between British Marxist organizations and the Soviet Union after 1917. While studies of British Marxist intellectual culture, including Stuart Macintyre’s A Proletarian Science and Jonathan Rèe’s Proletarian Philosophers, mention Kerr publications in passing, there has been little study of the practicalities of the relationship between this Chicago radical co-operative and British Marxists, and therefore the signicance of the US labour movement to the spread of Marxist literature in Britain has not been fully appreciated.2 The company’s archive contains the original stock certi- cates of the company from 1890 to 1924, as well as stockholder card les, making it possible to identify the names and addresses of British shareholders. This chapter attempts to extend Jason Martinek’s recent detailed analysis of US stockholders of Kerr – whom he labels ‘activist readers’ – to their
British counterparts.3 The share certicates of British stockholders of Kerr & Co. show how groups of workers, political clubs, miners’ libraries, branches of political parties and labour college classes clubbed together to buy books which then often subsequently circulated secondhand. These archives are evidence of the difculty of keeping aoat as a radical publisher, and of the commitment of their customers, both in the USA and across the English-speaking world, many of whom nancially invested in the company and acted as their unofcial agents.
