Samuel Smith & Co. / The Bengal Harkuru Press

Samuel Smith & Co. was one of the most active commercial print and publishing houses in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, operating from the Bengal Harkuru Press — itself one of the oldest and most durable English-language newspapers in colonial India. The Bengal Harkaru (the spelling varied across its long life) was founded in 1795, in the generation after James Augustus Hicky’s pioneering Bengal Gazette had demonstrated that a colonial press could function in Calcutta, and it remained in continuous publication until 1866, outlasting most of its rivals by decades.

Samuel Smith acquired the press in 1821, at a moment when Calcutta’s English-language print trade was expanding rapidly alongside the growth of the colonial administration, and he developed it into a diversified publishing operation.