Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the mechanical clock's depiction of time: just as the rectangular grid provided
a means of positioning places within an abstract Cartesian space, so did the
clock regulate time with uniform units. It was, therefore, clockmaker John
Harrison's invention of the marine chronometer in 1760 that proved to be the
decisive breakthrough in the race to measure longitude in su
ciently accurate
ways to facilitate long-distance navigation when he met the test set forth by
Parliament, losing only
five seconds on a nine-week trip to Jamaica. In solv-
ing the issue of how to measure longitude, he greatly facilitated the utilization
of a universal coordinate system of global maps. Harrison's chronographs
were a decisive technological victory for the British in their expanding control
of the world's oceans (Landes 1983) as well as for the emerging world economy
more generally, o
fi
ering a solution to a long-standing problem that helped to
initiate the auto-catalytic dynamics of the colonial order (Petersson 2005).
However, if the graticule became the accepted conceptual norm underpin-
ning global Cartesian space during the wave of European expansionism, its
implementation was nonetheless open for debate. In contrast to the poles,
for example, the choice of a prime meridian has no
ff
fixed location and is a
purely political act; any line of longitude is technically as good as any other.
Following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which enshrined the nation-state
as the fundamental actor of international politics, di
fi
erent states used their
own capital cities, such as Paris, Rome, Madrid, London, and Copenhagen;
others relied on Rhodes, Delphi, or Jerusalem. The resolution of this dilemma,
with its confounding mix of maps that were di
ff
cult to compare, awaited a
new round of time-space compression in the late nineteenth century.
With relatively reliable maps and ships, Europe's domination of the world
began to
flood the continent with enormous volumes of data. Captain Cook's
voyages to the Paci
fl
fi
c in the mid-eighteenth century, for example, were partly
scienti
c expeditions (including studies of the transit of Venus and a search
for the mysterious
terra australis
). As a result of such voyages, European
scientists had access to countless samples of plants and animals from diverse
environments, sparking new means of categorizing them and jump-starting
contemporary “natural science.” In 1735, for example, Linnaeus published
his
Systema Naturae
, the universal classi
fi
cation system designed to bring
biology into the Enlightenment frame of rationality. Similarly, Enlightenment
geography rendered the world comprehensible by subjecting its diverse peo-
ples and places to the conceptual lens of Western modernist rationality. To be
rational was to enfold the world within a particular Western way of under-
standing, one that erected reality as a picture to be gazed upon from a distance,
a totalized actuality that was ordered and structured, re
fi
ecting an epistemol-
ogy that Gregory (1994) calls the “world-as-exhibition.” Ó Tuathail (1996:53)
notes that this process folded neatly into the ascending ocularcentrism of
the age:
fl
By gathering, codifying, and disciplining the heterogeneity of the world's
geography into the categories of Western thought, a decidable, measured,
Search WWH ::
Custom Search