“To Save the Benefit of the Act of Parliamt”: Mapping an Early American Copyright

Abstract

Abstract While the reach of Parliament was hotly contested in eighteenth-century America, there was one Act in particular that proved especially complicated for geographer Lewis Evans and his daughter, Amelia Evans Barry. Believing that English copyright law did not extend to Philadelphia in the 1750s, Lewis Evans drew on a variety of tools and circumstances to, in essence, craft his own interpretation of what benefits of copyright he and his family could obtain. Rather than formal copyright disputes involving legal documentation, this particular episode focused on other aspects of A General Map of the Middle British Colonies, In America. Inheriting the copyright to A General Map from her father, Amelia Evans Barry in turn sought to enforce and recreate a claim to literary labor over subsequent decades. The result was a unique story of copyright’s origins in America that also underscored the challenge of enforcing structures of power and perceptions of authority, particularly over geographic media, in the British empire. The boundaries of jurisdiction and sovereignty, the same ones depicted in A General Map, were that much more difficult to enforce when it came to intellectual property.