Abstract
The personal politics of Major James Rennell were similar to those of John Pinkerton. Taking a critical line against Lord North’s handling of the discontents of the Americans, he came to a more conservative conclusion about the French Revolution:
The illustrious geographer was always an advanced Liberal in politics, but he loved his country’s greatness above all things, and imbibed a strong feeling of horror for the excesses of the French Revolution. He consequently attached himself to those Liberals, such as Lord Spencer and Sir W. Windham, who joined Burke in supporting the government of Pitt in a war policy.1
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Notes
Clements Markham, Major James Rennell and the Rise of Modern English Geography (London: Cassell, 1895), p. 105. Such positions are fully chronicled in O’Gorman, Whig Party and French Revolution.
See Michael Bravo, ‘Precision and Curiosity in Scientific Travel: James Rennell and the Orientalist Geography of the New Imperial Age (1760–1830)’ in Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds, Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion, 1999), pp. 162–83. See also
Brian Hudson, ‘The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918’, Antipode, 9.2 (1977), pp. 12–19.
Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’ in P.J. Marshall, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 231–52 at p. 244.
See James Rennell, Journals, T.H.D. La Touche, ed., in Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 3 (1910–14) (Calcutta, 1914), pp. 95–248.
Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus, Section XXVI. Rennell’s method was very similar to that of the French ‘rational geographers’, centred on the Académie des Inscriptions and led by D’Anville: see Guido Abbattista, ‘Establishing the “Order of Time and Place”: “Rational Geography”, French Erudition and the Emplacement of History in Gibbon’s Mind’ in David Womersley, ed., Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 335 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), pp. 45–72, esp. pp. 54–65.
See Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
For a similar nexus of assumptions at the same time, see William Ravenhill, ‘The honourable Robert Edward Clifford, 1767–1817: a Cartographer’s Response to Napoleon’, Geographical Journal, 160 (1994), pp. 159–72. See also Bravo, ‘Precision and Curiosity’, pp. 175–6.
See P.J. Marshall, East India Fortunes: the British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 8–9.
Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: the Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), pp. 100 and 104; see also pp. 29–30, 97–103 and 133–6.
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© 2000 Robert J. Mayhew
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Mayhew, R.J. (2000). On the Cusp of Modern Geography: Fieldwork and Textuality in the Career of James Rennell, 1764–1830. In: Enlightenment Geography. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595491_10
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