Georgina Rannard ‘Trade, Knowledge, and Fluid Spaces in Atlantic Empires, 1660-1720′

Updated abstract: Trade, Knowledge, and Fluid Spaces in Atlantic Empires, 1660-1720

Note:

My abstract (text below) is based on my ongoing doctoral work, although it relates to just one part of my thesis. I have attached some data in a pdf file that I think could be used for a type of map (appendix one)

The draft writing I have provided is very much the first part of drafting the writing of this section of the thesis. It is still in development. It is also attached in a pdf.

Finally, I suppose in some senses I have a strange perspective on the question of mapping and visualisation due to my focus on historical attempts to map and order space. I have looked a large amount of maps made in the 17th and 18th centuries, from a number of European countries (mostly Britain, the Dutch Republic, Spain, Italy and France), and so have an idea of how space was represented by historical actors. Unfortunately this exposure to maps has not translated (yet?) into an ability to produce my own 21st century map.

A summary of my PhD project, for background:

My research considers how growing British Atlantic trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (1660-1720) affected the knowledge economy in the Atlantic world. I consider how demands and opportunities related to growing colonial trade and settlement created a market for geographical information and skills. This was in response to expanding geographical boundaries, and a desire by mercantile, ‘scientific’ and maritime classes to process and manipulate space in the Atlantic for economic, imperial and ‘useful’ ends. I am also interested in how commerce both drew upon previously existing capacities (draughting, engraving, printing, ship pilotage) and created new features in the knowledge economy with specific economic and cultural attributes, for example selling information based on assertion of utility and accuracy. I aim to add a global or imperial dimension to historical discussions of the relationship between knowledge (including ‘useful knowledge’), technology and European economic development, by highlighting the flow of information and objects in early Atlantic empire. I am interested in the role of non-European spaces or colonial spaces in changing epistemologies in Europe, as observers in Europe (or Britain in this case) became aware that ‘nature’ performed differently in different places and that, in order to extract economic gain from new colonial environments, new resources and human capital had to be deployed.

Updated abstract:

In my abstract for this workshop I suggested that Atlantic history has traditionally be defined or bound by discussions of the same or similar events taking place within the Atlantic world (classically these would be revolutionary events, commercial trade, or processes of colonisation). Atlantic history is therefore made, to an extent, by writing histories of the same events, albeit with different impacts according to the side of the Atlantic under the lens. In these discussions, the actual physical space or geography of the Atlantic has become almost irrelevant, and history of this region tends to be told according to the dominant national actor in the particular time period. For example, British trade and colonization in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, the French revolution and American War of Independence in late 18^th century etc. The role of Spain in Atlantic history is often obscured due to their relative decline, in the eyes of colonial historians, as an imperial and American actor post-16^th century.

I suggested instead that Atlantic history could also be bound by analysis of historical reactions to the geographical space, so Atlantic history could be defined by the space itself, and by reactions of various actors and nations to the challenges of ‘discovering’, manipulating, and controlling Atlantic or, better still, American (both North and South) space. In an extended project, this would allow the historian to look at the behaviour of numerous national actors simultaneously and coherently. A key challenge is how to visually represent historical approaches to space. How can we build a coherent representation of numerous and likely contradictory iterations of the same geographical-bounded space? This (under-developed) idea comes from attempts in my doctoral work to look at global processes in the Atlantic. I have expanded on this idea in my suggestion for a ‘maker session’ in the workshop.

There are several strands of my work that engage with the ‘global’, both empirically and conceptually:

• My work considers the movement of information across and between different geographical locations. I try to be aware that information and objects perform differently according to their context and location – and I am interested in how information changed with movement and use. For example, a land survey created Jamaica to record the number of settlements and plantations in the 1660s was also sent to London with a ship’s captain. The Board of Trade used the information to inform their new ‘laws’ for the island. Some of the survey appears to have been in a printed map by publisher John Ogilby in 1671, who used the image of utility and novelty of information to assert his authority as a map-maker. The same index of plantations and crop type reappeared on a number of maps over the next decade. Of course, the idea that context would alter the use of information or objects is not revolutionary, but it highlights that when analysing global processes, historians are also discussing very local and specific contexts.
• The movement of geographical information within the Atlantic system, and between various points (some historians/geographers would refer to these as ‘nodes’) within the Atlantic world. This includes objects (drawings or maps), textual information, instructions, individuals’ knowledge or expertise, and was between (for example) London, the Caribbean and North America, and points in Spanish America. This fits within a strand of historiography in recent history of science that constructs networks in exchange of natural information or objects (often based on imperial networks), and a strand of economic history that considers the production and trade of goods in early modern empires. It moves beyond metropole or centre and periphery dichotomies, and identifies with work that aims to identify the role of non-Western places as sites of production of knowledge.
• It engages with a number of historiographical debates that relate implicitly and explicitly to global history, including questions about the economic impact of empire and colonial trade on European countries (including the Eric Williams thesis regarding capital accumulation and the Industrial Revolution, and modifications of his approach to include considering how trade created demand and encouraged innovation in human capital); knowledge transfer and the creation of economic and knowledge capacities linked to industrialization in Europe; the nature of mercantilism as a functioning or non-functioning governing framework in early modern empire (fluidity of knowledge transfer in the Americas suggests that aspects of mercantilism did not work well ‘in practice’). As other historians have noted, many of these are long-standing debates in economic history (Eric Williams wrote Capitalism and Slavery in 1944), but they have rarely been articulated or conceptualized as explicitly dealing in global or transnational history, and the recent surge of interest in global history often ignores this approach by economic historians.
• I am interested in trying to move beyond identification of networks (after all, the act of commerce and trade relied on quotidian networks by nature of the movement of goods and finance capital), and consider the historical meaning of these networks (what did or did they not enable actors to do), as well as trying to identify variations within the network. For example, there are cases where observed geographical information appears to have remained ‘at source’, despite instructions from British elites for information to be delivered to London.
• A lot of the information I am looking at (i.e geographical information describing the nature of natural phenomenon such as rivers, coastlines, mountains, and the location of settlements and plantations) was information created by individuals responding to new or changing spatial environments. In this sense, I am looking at historical reactions to space, as well as using a historical method that identifies space as an important analytical category.

Elements that could be visualized include:

– The movement of objects or information (for example tracing the movement of draughts from points of creation in the Americas to London – there is some archival evidence about maps or drawings being dispatched with ships captains, although this information is quite limited – or visualizing requests for geographical information made by the Board of Trade to governors in Jamaica, Barbados etc)

– Movement of information along to commercial routes

– Production of printed maps of regions correlated with settlement levels or volume and value of export goods in order to identify the mapping of space according to the function or value of the land. (See attached PDF ‘appendix 1′ for data). I also have data on the number of individual land surveys in three parishes in Jamaica as well as some information settlement and planting rate.

Appendix 1_Georgina Rannard

Graines workshop ideas for maker session_Georgina Rannard

Georgina Rannard_excerpt for Graines workshop