The top blurb on Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book describes it as a “remarkable global history of free speech”. But it isn’t, and throwing in an interesting chapter on the press in British-occupied India, a tedious one on 18th-century Scandinavian free-speech laws and referring to the French Revolution doesn’t really make it one.
No, it’s a polemical account of the evolution of American first-amendment exceptionalism (which the author, as we shall see, regards as an entirely bad thing), with most of the globe entirely omitted. You suspect the author all the way through of having what Keats called “palpable designs” on you, but you don’t fully catch up with his intentions until towards the end.
