Abstract
To understand the ‘politics of geography’ in the period 1650–1850 in a manner accordant with Oakeshott’s characterisation of historical individuals as passages of differences, we need to develop an understanding of the contemporary definitions of the spheres of politics and geography. With respect to geography, meshing the approaches of Skinnerian contextual history and the rubrics of historians of the book suggests three angles of approach: first, analysing geographical texts minutely; secondly, looking at the intended and actual readership of those texts; and finally, investigating the careers of the authors who produced those works, and the print culture in which they operated. Each of these approaches will help to elucidate not only the definition, nature and status of geography, but also why and in what ways geography was interwoven with contemporary understandings of the realm of political discourse. Before doing this, however, we need briefly to characterise the constitution of the political sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, elucidating its differences from present-day conceptions.1
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Notes
For an exemplary study of literature which starts from contemporary understandings of politics rather than vague evocations of the ‘politics of literature’, see Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: a Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); idem, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For the persistence of the historical approach to politics, see J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of England and its Enemies 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and
R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
See Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: E.J. Arnold, 1983); and
Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
See J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); idem, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
A.M.C. Waterman, ‘The Nexus between Theology and Political Doctrine in Church and Dissent’, in Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 193–218;
James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Non-Conformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Condren, Language of Politics, pp. 33–4; and Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken.
See Lesley Cormack, ‘“Good fences make good neighbours”: Geography as Self-Definition in Early-Modern England’, Isis, 82 (1991), pp. 639–61;
Lesley Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), Chapters 3–5; Sitwell, Four Centuries of Special Geography, pp. 2–8; and
David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), pp. 7–20.
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language [1755] (London: Longman facsimile, 1990), sub. world. This was sense 1 in Johnson’s Dictionary, where sense 3, ‘the earth; the terraqueous globe’ is the sense that has come to predominate. See also Thomas Blount, Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue (London, 1661); and Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall (London, 1604).
Chambers, Cyclopædia, sub. Chorography. For the history of English chorography, see Stan A.E. Mendyk, Speculum Britanniae: Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989); and
Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
Ptolemy, Geography, Edward Stevenson, ed. (New York: Dover Press, 1991), Bk. 1.1, p. 25. For the enduring importance of this image, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), pp. 133–6.
See Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 12.
J.N.L. Baker, The History of Geography: Papers by J.N.L. Baker (Oxford: Blackwells, 1963), p. 103. This complaint aside, Baker has done more to elucidate eighteenth-century geography as the eighteenth century defined it than any other scholar.
See, for example, the practise of the ‘father of American geography’, Jedidiah Morse, who relied on correspondence and travel books, as described in Ralph Brown, ‘The American Geographies of Jedidiah Morse’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 31 (1941), pp. 144–217 at pp. 147–8, pp. 160–2 and 210.
See Rachel Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology: the Foundations of a Science, 1650–1830 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) and
Martin Rudwick, ‘Minerals, Strata and Fossils’, in N. Jardine et al., eds, Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 266–86.
Johnson, Dictionary. On the meaning of ‘science’, see also Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-centring the “big picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science’, British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), pp. 407–32 at pp. 420–1. Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought, p. 146, notes that geography was ‘outside the orbit of the physical sciences’, but does not recognise that geography in the understanding of the period was nevertheless scientific because ‘science’ as a term had a different domain of application.
Sitwell, Four Centuries of Special Geography, p. 4. See also Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), pp. 69–75 for this, Carter’s interest being in the genre of the travel narrative rather than the geography book.
See Mona Domosh, ‘Toward a Feminist Historiography of Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N.S. 16 (1991) pp. 95–104; and
Denis Cosgrove and Mona Domosh, ‘Writing and Authority: Writing the New Cultural Geography’, in James Duncan and David Ley, eds, Place/Culture/Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 25–38.
This commonplace starts with Ortelius, and no doubt owes something to Ptolemy’s previously-discussed imagery. For conceptions of the nature of historical enquiry in early-modern England, see Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (London: Macmillan, 1996), esp. pp. 7–22.
Vicesimus Knox, Liberal Education: Or, a Practical Treatise on the Methods of Acquiring Useful and Polite Learning (London, 1781), p. 162. The notion of gentlemanly learning was particularly important in the eighteenth century, but Knox is unusual in linking geography to this discourse. For the importance of gentlemanly learning as a discourse to science, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994) and
John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See P. Cunish et al., A History of Magdalene College Cambridge, 1428–1988 (Cambridge: Magdalene College Press, 1994), pp. 160–2.
Jonathan Smith, ‘State Formation, Geography, and a Gentleman’s Education’, Geographical Review, 86 (1996), pp. 91–100.
Thomas Watts, An Essay on the Proper Method for Forming the Man of Business [1716], Arthur H. Cole, ed. (Boston: Harvard Graduate School, 1946), p. 24.
For more on this subject, see Charles Withers, ‘Towards a History of Geography in the Public Sphere’, History of Science, 37 (1999), pp. 47–78, at pp. 52–63.
Richard Sorrenson, ‘Towards a History of the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50 (1996), pp. 29–46 at p. 30.
See also Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 53–6.
Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and
Simon Schaffer, ‘The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics in the World of Goods’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 489–526.
For more on this, see Robert Mayhew, ‘Geography in Eighteenth Century British Educationb’, Paedagogica Historica, N.S. 34 (1998), pp. 731–69.
Pat Rogers, Grubstreet: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 281. For geography and the dunces at an earlier time, see Smith, ‘State Formation and Gentleman’s Education’, pp. 98–9.
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, G.B. Hill, ed., L.F. Powell, rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), II 52.
Alexander Pope, The Dunciad [1742 edn.] IV 193–4, in Poems, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963).
Thomas Hearne, quoted in Robin Butlin, ‘Ideological Contexts and the Reconstruction of Biblical Landscapes in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: Dr Edward Wells and the Historical Geography of the Holy Land’, in Alan Baker and Gideon Biger, eds, Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 31–62 at p. 33.
For a detailed study of this process in operation in Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography, see J.K. Wright, ‘Some British “Grandfathers” of American Geography’, in R. Miller and J. Wreford Watson, eds. Geographical Essays in Memory of Alan G. Ogilvie (London: Nelson, 1959), pp. 144–65.
See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), Chapters 2 and 3; and Rose, Owners and Authors.
Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, pp. 153 and 155. See also Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Print, new edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
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Mayhew, R.J. (2000). The Sphere of Geography and the Realm of Politics in Britain, c.1650–1850. In: Enlightenment Geography. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595491_2
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