Eighteenth-century geography: texts, practices, sites

Abstract

This essay examines recent work on geography in the eighteenth century. Although it principally considers Britain, the paper also incorporates evidence from other countries and, in its concentration upon the eighteenth century rather than ‘early modern geography’ (the period c. 1600-1850), the essay offers a focus different from much other work. It is argued that, although geography may in its books have been understood by contemporaries as a consistently defined textual practice, significant variations existed in the cognitive content, purposive nature and institutional setting of geography. That this is so has important implications both for what we take geography in the eighteenth century to have been and for the nature of further research on the subject’s historical, intellectual and geographical dimensions.