Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities 1580-1620 - Hardcover

Cormack, Lesley B.

9780226116068: Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities 1580-1620

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226116069 ISBN 13: 9780226116068

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1997

How did early modern England—an island nation on the periphery of world affairs—transform itself into the center of a worldwide empire? Lesley B. Cormack argues that the newly institutionalized study of geography played a crucial role in fueling England's imperial ambitions.

Cormack demonstrates that geography was part of the Arts curriculum between 1580 and 1620, read at university by a broad range of soon-to-be political, economic, and religious leaders. By teaching these young Englishmen to view their country in a global context, and to see England playing a major role on that stage, geography supplied a set of shared assumptions about the feasibility and desirability of an English empire. Thus, the study of geography helped create an ideology of empire that made possible the actual forays of the next century.

Geography emerges in Cormack's account as the fruitful ground between college and court, in whose well-prepared soil the seeds of English imperialism took root. Charting an Empire will interest historians of science, geography, cartography, education, and empire.

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From the Back Cover:

Cormack argues that the study of geography played a crucial role in shaping England's imperial ambitions. Cormack demonstrates that geography was part of the Arts curriculum between 1580 and 1620, read at university by a broad range of soon-to-be political, economic, and religious leaders. By teaching these young Englishmen to view their country in a global context, and to see England playing a major role on that stage, geography helped develop a set of shared assumptions about the feasibility and desirability of an English empire. The study of geography also provided new research methods and assumptions about natural philosophy, as well as a threefold approach to the formerly unified field of geography itself. Through its new subdivisions - mathematical geography, descriptive geography, and chorography (local history) - geography encouraged quantification of the world, an inductive methodology, and an ideology that prized utilitarian knowledge above all else.

About the Author:

Lesley B. Cormack is associate professor of history at the University of Alberta.

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