Robert Darnton recreates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In 18th-century France, censors, authors and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. And in Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society.