“highly ambitious and impressive … rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking … testifying not only to decades of work in the field, but also to a marvellous openness to new ideas, new sources and new approaches. The news, in this case, is that here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount.” Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement.
“Joad Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work of transnational history, one that is theoretically insightful without succumbing to jargon, deeply grounded in a rich seam of primary sources, and informed by contemporary resonance and serious moral purpose.” Peter Marshall, History Today.
“Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange starts out from these already lofty foothills and takes his subject to further heights. The book’s ambition is prodigious. Here is an account of how news was recorded, transmitted, consumed and made sense of – one which ranges in time from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the advent of the mass-market newspaper in the early 19th century, and traverses the entireEuropean continent, from London to Moscow. Comparative excurses take in places as far-flung as 16th-century Brazil and late Ming China … rarely have the connections between each constituent part of the network been anatomised so surely or across so vast a geographical range. The sheer breadth and depth of Raymond Wren’s polyglot reading is formidable, and there is hardly a subject to which he does not bring fresh insight…. Bold in conception, magisterial inits command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment – one that is destined to be the starting point for further investigations of how Europe received and thought about its news for many years to come.” John Adamson, Literary Review.
“Utopian, too, is the ambition to write a history of news, that most quicksilver of commodities and Wren has knowingly attempted the impossible. For all the unavoidable imperfections of any attempt to capture such an evanescent subject, however, The Great Exchange must be counted a triumphant success.’ Daniel Johnson, The Critic.
“Wren is a recovering academic, expert in the field of bibliography, or book history. You can tell from The Great Exchange that his devotion to that discipline and talent in its interpretation were fierce and genuine, and that he was always going to be obliged by temperament to burst free of its limitations. The book is much less conventional than it looks.” Minoo Dinshaw, The Spectator.
Joad R Wren 