What Is Free Speech?

'Free Speech!' is a clarion call all over the world, yet what it means today is more contested than ever. Many cultures regard it as dangerous: in China, India, and across the Islamic world often punished for expressing unorthodox views about politics, sex, or religion. Even in the Western world, where it is regarded as a core value, there exists widespread discord and disagreement about what freedom of expression should be. As we navigate cultural taboos, shifts in power and inequalities on a global scale, and a fast-changing media landscape continually beset by new technologies, the question of where freedom of speech come from, and where it can it take us, becomes crucial.Fara Dabhoiwala finds a new path through the controversy by examining free speech not in the abstract, but something which has evolved historically. He describes how the notion of 'speaking freely' operated in the time before our modern conception was invented in early 18th century Britain. He examines how the ideals proposed by pioneers like 'Cato' (in fact two Grub Street journalists) and John Stuart Mill were shaped by their own contexts, and how these were moulded in contrasting global settings, from slave societies in North America and the Caribbean and social justice movements in France, Britain, and Scandinavia, to colonial India and 20th century United States in the throes of the Cold War.Through the lens of history, What Is Free Speech? shows us that freedom of speech is not an absolute from which societies and regimes have drifted or dissented at different times, but something more complicated and interesting, and shows the bases on which freedom of expression might be maintained - or challenged - in our own time.