“Freedom of expression!” is a resounding cry around the world, yet its meaning today is more contested than ever. Many cultures view it as dangerous: in China, India, and the Islamic world, unorthodox views on politics, sex, and religion are suppressed, and people are often punished for expressing them. Even in the Western world, where freedom of expression is considered a core value, there is widespread disagreement about its meaning. Amid enduring power imbalances, ever-evolving cultural taboos, exciting new technologies, and a rapidly changing global media landscape, where freedom of expression comes from—and how we should think about it—are crucial questions. Through the lens of history, “What Is Freedom of Expression?” shows us that freedom of expression is not an absolute from which societies and regimes have deviated or opposed at various times, but something far more complex and intriguing. Dabhoiwala demonstrates that our modern notions of freedom of the press and expression were invented in Britain around 1700. The true history of free speech is the story of the countless remarkable men and women whose lives have shaped its principles and practices over the past 300 years—slaves and imperialists, poets and philosophers, the wealthy and revolutionaries. Spanning Europe, North America, and South Asia, without neglecting other parts of the world, Dabhoiwala rejects celebratory platitudes about the past and present of free speech. Instead, his book explains how to think more deeply about free speech as both a global and a local issue—by tracing how we arrived at our current predicament, showing that history complicates our contemporary assumptions, and suggesting new possibilities for the future.