Enlightenment Geography 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. The definition and role of geography in a humanist structure of knowledge are examined and shown to tie it to political discourse. Geographical works are shown to have developed Whig and Tory defences of the English church and state, consonant with the conservatism of the English Enlightenment. These politicizations were questioned by those indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment Geography questions broad assumptions about British intellectual history through a revisionist history of geography.

Autorentext

ROBERT MAYHEW was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is currently a Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University.

Inhalt

List of Figures Acknowledgements Effacing and Recovering the History of Geography The Sphere of Geography and the Realm of Politics in Britain, c.1650-1850 'Geography is Twinned with Divinity': The Lauduan 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 Edition 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.P. McCulloch, 1830-50 Coda: Halford Mackinder and the Empire of 'New' Political Geography, c.1887-1919 Enlightenments and Geography: Continuity and Change in the Politics of Early Modern British Geography, c.1550-1850 Notes Bibliography Index