Conclusion: Design

Abstract

When in 1671, John Ogilby, Charles II’s “ Cosmographer, Geographick Printer, and Master of the Revels in the Kingdom of Ireland,” surveyed in 674 dense pages over 200 years of activity by rival Europeans to possess the lands and peoples of America, he used the word “design” 154 times. These were generally the public projections of individuals onto the lands and peoples of two continents: their place on the globe was “(as if design’d) for Transportation to America.”¹ Cromwell’s Western Design to humiliate the Spanish in the Greater Antilles evidenced the grand political deliberations of Whitehall and its servants, in an epithet coined by the pen of General Robert Venables to identify the mismatch between those “wholly cast … in the management of this western design” whose “pikes prove[d] too short.”² It thereby excused poor human execution of God’s Design: Jamaica was the prize for English sin. At a personal level, everyone who set off on a venture, a risk, or voyage; or who formulated a plan, speculated, described, surveyed and delineated; who made a bequest; built, cultivated, or destroyed, was about the business of designing and designating. Every action taken and every decision made, no matter how intimate, was the consequence of deliberation: what differed was the degree to which hegemonies, structures, and power curtailed many from fulfilling their designs.