Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“Behind them, Europe; before them, an unformed and unsignifying universe.”
Thus, the discourses of space—in this case maps—did far more than simply
represent entities that existed before them, but were actively a part of
pro-
ducing
that very geography. Spatial discourses, in short, are simultaneously
re
ective and constitutive of the reality they represent.
In the wake of Magellan's circumnavigation, the globe and atlases made
their historic appearance. In 1570 Abraham Ortelius published the
fl
first atlas
purporting to encompass the entire planet, the
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
.
Thus, whereas previous geographical imaginations included boundaries
between the known and unknown, Renaissance Europe managed to con-
struct a perspective in which the entire planet fell under the Western purview.
By 1700, pocket globes had accompanied pocket watches, and an essential
knowledge of history and geography was deemed necessary for the educated
elites of Europe. This secular notion of space began to undermine long-held
religious ones: increasingly, by the mid-seventeenth-century, religious founda-
tions to the structure of time and space began to lose hold, albeit gradually.
Indeed, the last reference to Europe as a uni
fi
fi
ed Christendom was in the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 (Cosgrove 2001).
After the
first visit to the Cape of Good Hope, it was the measurement of
distances between longitudes that mattered more than those between lati-
tudes. Latitude, at least in the northern hemisphere, could be easily reckoned
using the altitude of the North Star above the horizon. In other contexts, the
declination of the sun could be used; tables for this purpose were available by
the thirteenth century, and were widely published upon the invention of the
printing press (Landes 1983). “The basic principle behind the observation of
longitudinal di
fi
erences was the conceptual equivalence of longitude and
time” (Edney 1990:86), that is, the fact that the earth rotates 15 degrees every
hour. Longitude on land was relatively easy to calculate by comparing the
time of given celestial events in di
ff
erent places, a feat made possible through
improvements in horology. Longitude at sea, however, where establishing
identical times at two separate points was essentially impossible, was another
issue altogether, and had vexed sailors for centuries. On land, features could
be used in the process of triangulation, a process impossible on the open
ocean. Sailors long knew that the sun moved through one degree of longitude
every four minutes, but establishing identical times at two separate points was
intractable. Attempts to calculate longitude accurately therefore form one of
the most famous examples in history of a deliberate conquest of space. In
1598, Philip III of Spain of
ff
ff
ered a prize of 10,000 ducats; in 1626, the Dutch
put up 25,000
florins. But
given British mastery of the world's oceans, it is no coincidence that they took
the lead in the solution of this problem; indeed, the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich was created speci
fl
florins, and Louis XIV of France of
ff
ered 100,000
fl
fi
cally for this task. In 1714, the Board of Longi-
tude o
ciently accurate to allow
the measurement of longitude with precision. The European rationalization
of space through the imposition of latitude and longitude was paralleled by
ff
ered £20,000 for a timekeeping device su
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