These green and printed lands: How William Caxton developed Englishness, and how his Englishness is breaking down (Freddie Attenborough, 11 July, 2026, The Critic)
Indeed, perhaps the chief benefit of the exhibition is that, through its attention to primary sources accumulated between the fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries, it forces us to approach “England” not as a natural inheritance but as an historical achievement: the coming together of capitalist productive relations, print technology and the emergent administrative state at a particular historical juncture. […]
As a matter of material necessity, Caxton and his contemporaries were primarily concerned to make a profit, and to sell their products to the largest possible number of readers. But how to do so? True, Latin had long operated as an elite, transnational medium of handwritten communication among clerics and scholars. Yet as a market for mechanically reproduced texts, now assuming the form of commodities, it was limited. Nor could printers simply descend into the full plurality of spoken dialects, each too local, unstable and limited to justify the enlarged print-runs on which the new technology depended.
It was the genius of humble but extraordinarily savvy, commercially minded printers like Caxton slowly to assemble a new vernacular reading public below the transnational republic of Latin and the administrative vernacular of the elites, but, crucially, above the mutually opaque world of local dialects. What emerged, over time, was not “English” as a natural tongue, but a mechanically reproducible print-language, capable of dissemination — and sale — through the largest market available to it.
In other words, moveable type and the rate of turnover of capital were not incidental to the development of “our” national identity, but helped establish the material conditions under which this possessive adjective could, over the centuries following Caxton’s publication of Chaucer, become thinkable.