Adrian Johns

Current Research 

I am currently completing a major project on the history of piracy – the intellectual-property kind, not the seaborne (although they are, it turns out, related). It extends from the Renaissance to the present, from handwritten manuscripts to digital movies.  The book mansucript, provisionally entitled Piracy: Creativity, Commerce and Crime in the modern age, was submitted to the University of Chicago Press in mid-2007 and is currently being examined by readers.

Future projects include:

Death of a pirate: murder and a media revolution.  A book about a shooting in 1960s Britain that brought to a head the challenge of pirate stations to the public radio broadcasting monopoly.  The book examines the politics of broadcasting and public authority that lay behind the incident.  It outlines the role of pirate media in the emergence of neoliberalism, and traces connections to today’s digital piracy.  The manuscript is roughly half complete.

Pharmacopoeias: print, authenticity, and modernity.  A project now in its early stages on half a millennium of efforts to police the identity of substances (medicaments, foods, colors, etc.) by deploying the power of print.  The hypothesis is that pharmacopoeias, the genre of works that sought to guarantee substances by fixing their formulae in print, pose a fundamental problem about modernity itself.  They have never really worked, except through the mediation of powerful but inscrutable policing practices.  Their history enables us to see both where the power of print really resides and how the stability of both texts and substances came to be taken for granted in modern society.

Mr Smith goes to Tokyo.  A project, also in its early stages, on Erasmus Peshine Smith.  Smith was an American political economist, lawyer, and (at one point) natural scientist who was recruited by the Meiji Emperor of Japan to become his advisor on trade and foreign affairs in the 1870s.  Living in the imperial quarters at a time when other Westerners were largely restricted to Yokohama, Smith had unique access to the emperor’s household, and seems to have used it to advise policies in radical opposition to those preferred by Washington and London.  The result was a scandal with repercussions that extended to the bases of colonialism, the slave trade, and economic liberalism.  Smith’s private papers have survived unseen, and I hope to use them to tell this story for the first time.