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Between 1580 and 1745, a period that saw Edmund Spenser's journey to an unconquered Ireland and the Jacobite Rebellion, the first British Empire was established. The intervening years saw the cultural and material forces of colonialism pursue a fitful, often fanciful endeavour to secure space for this expansion. With the defeat of the Highland clans, what England in 1580 could only dream about had materialised: a coherent, socio-spatial system known as an empire. Taking the Atlantic world as its context, this ambitious 1999 book argues that England's culture during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was saturated with a geographic imagination fed by the experiences and experiments of colonialism. Using theories of space and its production to ground his readings, Bruce McLeod skilfully explores how works by Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift imagine, interrogate and narrate the adventure and geography of empire.
Argues that patronage served a very useful function and should not be seen as a form of corruption. This book, based on extensive original research, examines the rich and varied nature of patronage in the British navy at the end of the long eighteenth century. Patronage underpinned naval advancement, determined where officers, seamen and dockyard workers were stationed, and fashioned their reputations. It was also a system of trust whereby an individual's connections acted as guarantors of their ability, character and suitability for a position. This book moves beyond considering patronage as being primarily about promotion to uncover its deeper social and cultural implications. Considering ...
Focusing on aspects of the functioning of technology, and by looking at instruments and at instrumental performance, this book addresses the epistemological questions arising from examining the technological bases to geographical exploration and knowledge claims. Questions of geography and exploration and technology are addressed in historical and contemporary context and in different geographical locations and intellectual cultures. The collection brings together scholars in the history of geographical exploration, historians of science, historians of technology and, importantly, experts with curatorial responsibilities for, and museological expertise in, major instrument collections. Ranging in their focus from studies of astronomical practice to seismography, meteorological instruments and rockets, from radar to the hand-held barometer, the chapters of this book examine the ways in which instruments and questions of technology - too often overlooked hitherto - offer insight into the connections between geography and exploration.