8. Print Agency and Civic Press Identity Across the Border: Commerce and Regional Improvement in the Glasgow Advertiser, Liverpool General Advertiser, and the Urban Directories of Liverpool and Glasgow, 1765–1795

This chapter explores how parallel regional, civic, and commercial imperatives were manifested in two publishing ventures on either side of the Border in the late eighteenth century, qualifying recent histories of the British newspaper press that emphasise distinctive Scottish and English national press contexts in the period. The chapter maps how John Mennons and John Gore, the respective editor/publishers of the Glasgow Advertiser and Liverpool General Advertiser, used their newspapers as print vehicles for civic and regional economic development with an explicit focus on the material and commercial needs of the business communities in the expanding urban regions of Glasgow and Liverpool. These included a common concern for the modernisation of regional transportation infrastructure, the expansion of overseas trade, the development of civic-regional commercial improvement networks—the latter embodied in their publicity roles for the Glasgow and Liverpool Chambers of Commerce, founded in 1783 and 1774, respectively. The chapter concludes by highlighting how both newspapers were linked to supplementary publishing ventures anatomising the civic-commercial institutional cultures of Glasgow and Liverpool through a comparative assessment of Jones’s Directory (1787) and Glasgow Almanack for 1790, published by Mennons, and Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1781, 1790).