Rulers quickly realized that print was power. Wherever presses spread, governments and churches tried to control them. The struggle between censorship and freedom of the press, which began in the sixteenth century, produced some of the most important arguments for free expression ever written.

Licensing and control

The most common form of control was licensing: books could not be printed without official permission, granted before publication. In England, the crown gave the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers and booksellers, a royal charter in 1557, allowing it to control the trade in return for helping suppress unwanted books. Printers who published without permission could lose their presses, be fined or be imprisoned. Authors of seditious or heretical works could face execution.

Control was never complete. Books banned in one country were printed in another and smuggled across borders. Amsterdam, Geneva and other cities with relatively tolerant authorities became centers for printing works banned elsewhere.

Milton's Areopagitica

During the English Civil War, Parliament itself reintroduced licensing in 1643. In response, the poet John Milton published, without a license, a pamphlet called Areopagitica (1644), one of the great defenses of free expression. He argued that truth grows stronger by being tested against error, that licensing treats readers like children, and that destroying books destroys reason itself: “as good almost kill a man as kill a good book.” His most famous line is a demand: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Milton's defense had limits. He did not extend toleration to Catholic writings, which he considered a political threat. Even pioneers of free expression drew lines that later generations would reject.

The end of licensing

England's Licensing Act was renewed several times but finally lapsed in 1695, when Parliament declined to renew it. Pre-publication licensing ended, although writers could still be prosecuted afterward for seditious libel or blasphemy. Newspapers multiplied. In 1710 the Statute of Anne created the first copyright law, giving authors, not just printers, the right to control copies of their works for a limited term. It recognized that writers had an interest in their own work and that the public had an interest in eventually sharing it freely.

The first newspapers

Printed news sheets developed in the seventeenth century. The Relation, published by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg in 1605, is widely recognized as the first newspaper. Weekly papers soon appeared in Amsterdam, London and elsewhere. Newspapers created a public that followed events together and discussed them in coffee houses, a space for political debate outside the control of courts and churches.

Sweden and America

In 1766 Sweden passed a Freedom of the Press Act that abolished political censorship and gave citizens the right to read official government documents, often described as the world's first law protecting press freedom. In colonial New York, the printer John Peter Zenger was tried in 1735 for seditious libel after his newspaper criticized the governor. His lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, argued that printing the truth could not be libel, and the jury acquitted Zenger, a case later celebrated as a landmark for press freedom. The First Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1791, forbade Congress to make laws abridging freedom of speech or of the press.

Printing in the Ottoman Empire

Not every society adopted printing at the same pace. In the Ottoman Empire, Jewish refugees from Spain set up Hebrew presses in Istanbul by 1493, and Armenian and Greek communities also printed books. But printing in Arabic script by Muslims was not established until Ibrahim Müteferrika opened a press in Istanbul in the 1720s, with official permission, printing works on history, geography and language. Historians debate the reasons for the delay: religious concern about printing sacred texts, the influence of skilled calligraphers, the technical difficulty of Arabic letterforms, and limited demand. Older accounts that blamed a single ban are now seen as too simple.

Worked example: the licenser's desk

Imagine you are a government licenser in London in 1640. Three manuscripts arrive.

• A sermon criticizing the bishops for corruption.
• A treatise arguing that the king must obey Parliament on taxation.
• A pamphlet containing false rumors that a named merchant poisoned a rival.

Under licensing, you decide in advance which may be printed, and you might refuse all three. Under Milton's principle, the first two should be published so that readers can test their arguments. The third is different: it spreads specific falsehoods that harm a named person. Modern free societies typically handle such cases after publication, through laws against defamation, rather than by banning books before anyone reads them.

The difference matters. Prior restraint lets officials decide what the public may hear; after-the-fact remedies let the public hear first and hold writers responsible for real harms. The line between protecting people from harm and protecting rulers from criticism is the central question of every debate over censorship, then and now.