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Abstract: It has recently become more common for literary scholars to engage with broader fields of study which bear names like "media," "other-than-text," and "graphic pluralism." Fitting comfortably within these capacious fields of study lie the shippers' marks employed by colonial Americans for the purposes of Atlantic commerce. These marks were signs whose most straightforward meanings could be ascertained by reference to relatively settled and widely apprehended codes. Durable, legible, and recognizable in law, marks made it possible for empires to grow and traders to prosper. Yet marks were never as stable as they were broadly perceived to be. The meanings of marks could shift across space and time, and the gradual accumulation of marks on property in transit opened up new possibilities for interpretation, allowing marked property to be "read" for meanings beyond those dictated by code. As the story of the Boston Loyalist printer John Mein reveals, mark reading was in itself a process bearing political meaning. It was precisely because marks were so durable and legible, and because the practice of mark reading was so widely associated with conformity to law and order, that changes to that practice could be politically unsettling.
keywords: Atlantic World, commerce, trade, shipping, semiotics, codes, marks, brands, balemarks, casks, crates, emblems, packaging, John Mein, American Revolution, Boston, print culture
The London Assurance Company's marine ledger, which today lies in the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives, is an orderly record of the company's daily sales of marine insurance policies. Each entry in the ledger represents a unique insurance policy, covering a specific vessel or parcel of property bound from one destination to another. Though written in old-fashioned script, the entries are clean, legible, and logical, and modern readers can learn to read them quickly. It would be easy to transcribe this ledger and upload it to the internet, where it would become a useful resource for economic historians and humanists using digital methods.
As the transcribers and digitizers of the ledger worked, however, they would run into one serious problem, a crucial element of the marine ledger that was never designed to be printed, let alone digitized. This element is the mark that was used to identify the insured property. Our transcribers would ask: How ought...