Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650-1850 (Studies in Modern History)

This book is the first detailed study of the politics of British geography books and of related forms of geographical knowledge in the period from 1650 to 1850. It is a contribution to the intellectual history of geographical knowledge in particular and of Britain more generally. The definition and role of geography in a humanist structure of knowledge are examined, as are the audience for and print culture of geography before its formalization as a discipline in the late 19th century. In all these respects, geography is shown to have been tied to political discourse.

Robert J. Mayhew is Lecturer in Human Geography at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Effacing and Recovering the History of Geography * The Sphere of Geography and the Realm of Politics in Britain c. 1650-1850 * "Geography is Twined with Divinity:" The Laudian Geography of Peter Heylyn, 1621-57 * John Ogilby and the Iconographic Roads to a Restored Royalist Geography, c. 1660-75 * The Political and Geographical Appropriations of Edmund Bohun, 1684-1710 * Edmund Gibson's Editions of Britannia : Loyalist Chorography and the Politics of Precedent, 1695-1722 * Varieties of Orthodox Geography, 1700-50: Three Vignettes: Echard, Wells and Salmon * The Denominational Politics of Travel Writing: The Case of Tory Anglicans in the 1770s * The Scottish Enlightenment and British Geography (I): Guthrie and Pinkerton, c.1770-1802 * On the Cusp of Modern Geography: Fieldwork and Textuality in the Career of James Rennell, 1764-1830 * The Scottish Enlightenment and British Geography (II): James Bell and J.R. McCulloch * Coda: Halford Mackinder and the Empire of "New" Political Georgraphy, c.1887-1919 * Enlightenments and Geography: Continuity and Change in the Politics of Early Modern British Geography, c.1550-c.1850