Abstract
This developmental paper investigates the history of ‘Commonwealth rights’, or the practice of granting UK publishers the exclusive right to distribute books across the Commonwealth book markets. Drawing from institutionalist studies of publishing industry, it explores how publishers’ contracts can be conceptualised as ‘institutional work’, specifically ‘maintenance work’, that has sustained this practice from the 1940s. Working with publishers’ archives, this research aims to illustrate how exactly this practice has been maintained, firstly, under the Traditional Market Agreement (TMA) in the 1950s and, secondly, after the formal end of the TMA in the 1980s.