In the first decades of the nineteenth century the United States and Mexico reached out to one another to initiate diplomacy, trade, and cultural borrowings. Each faced the task of decolonization and nation-building. The United States envisioned opportunities in Mexico for expansion; Mexico looked to the United states to learn how to recover from war, how to come together in peacetime, and how to write a constitution.
 
The Bookrunner explores the political and cultural history of Mexico at the time of its independence from Spain. At the center of the study are letters written to the Philadelphia book publisher Matthew Carey by Thomas Robeson, a book agent sent to Mexico by Carey in 1822. Nancy Vogeley demonstrates the important role that the inter-American book trade played in the formation of postcolonial national identities in the Americas and casts a new light on the historical interconnnections between print capitalism and nationalism.
 
I view The Bookrunner as a major contribution to book history, to American literary history in its new hemispheric framing, to the intellectual history of modern politics, and to the history of commerce.
David S. Shields
University of South Carolina
 
This study clearly reflects a lifetime of research on the role of books, pamphlets, and newspapers in the transformation of political culture in Mexico. It brings Philadelphia book printing and trading into the broader picture of a momentous moment in world history, as the Spanish empire collapsed and its component parts began new relationships with Europe and the United States.
Brian Connaughton
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Mexico City

 Nancy Vogeley is Professor Emerita of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of San Francisco.