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Diversions of Empire Thesis ABSTRACT DIVERSIONS OF EMPIRE: GEOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BRITISH ATLANTIC, 1589-1700 by Melissa Nicole Morris This thesis discusses the history of English colonization and print culture over the course of the seventeenth century, showing how they came together in geographies, a type of non-fiction that was very popular during this period. Geography books were a uniquely English genre that led readers on a country-by-country journey around the world, describing both the landscape and the peoples. Focusing specifically on representations of four English colonies in the Americas, this thesis will show how geography writers helped enlarge English readers’ sense of their homeland and how these writers promoted notions of Englishness during a period when that concept was in flux. DIVERSIONS OF EMPIRE: GEOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BRITISH ATLANTIC, 1589-1700 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of History by Melissa Nicole Morris Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2010 Advisor________________________________________ Carla Gardina Pestana Reader________________________________________ Andrew R. L. Cayton Reader________________________________________ Steven M. Norris © Melissa N. Morris 2010 Table of Contents Introduction: The Geographical Imagination of Early Modern England........................... 1 Part I: Geographic Knowledge in Early Modern England ....................................................... 4 Updating Process ..........................................................................................................................................21 Part II: Geography and Empire......................................................................................................28 Jamaica .............................................................................................................................................................36 New York .........................................................................................................................................................40 Virginia.............................................................................................................................................................47 New England...................................................................................................................................................51 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................55 Afterword..............................................................................................................................................56 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................63 iii List of Figures Figure 1: T-O Map after the discovery of America, from Heinrich Buenting's Itinerarium Sacrae Scriptura, 1581. ...................................................................................................................... 7 Figure 2: Giacomo Gastaldi, Tierra Nueva, 1548......................................................................... 22 Figure 3: Europa Regina, from Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia, 1570. ................................ 31 Figure 4: A map of the "Caribee Islands"..................................................................................... 39 iv Introduction: The Geographical Imagination of Early Modern England “Variety and Novelty are the most pleasant Entertainments of Mankind, and if so, then certainly nothing can be more divertive than Relations of the New World.” -R.B., The English Empire in America, 1685 In what seems like a profound coincidence to modern observers, Europeans developed the printing press at roughly the same time they first set out for the Americas. They did not, however, immediately publish book after book about the New World using this new technology. In fact, many Europeans did not seem to be interested particularly in the Americas for a century after Columbus’ voyage. What then, was the connection between the two breakthroughs that arguably brought about the modern era? Some Europeans, like the Dutch, printed maps to transmit knowledge about the New World. The pioneering Spanish published the first traveler’s accounts, but works by writers from other nations quickly followed. Still, these continental nations did not ultimately make the deepest connection between print culture and the Americas during this era. Instead, England, a country that has been seen as lagging behind in both printing technology and in New World colonization, embraced a new genre that presented and interpreted the Americas. Starting around 1600, the English developed, refined, and consumed geographies, a new literary genre that presented information about distant lands to an expanding reading public. Believing that New World colonization was the sure path to bringing England greater glory, some English men used the geography to promote English expansion. Over the next several decades, authors would hurriedly put together the latest information taken from traveler’s accounts, official reports, and even from their competitors’ works in an effort to produce the best, most comprehensive, and most popular special geography--a book that covered the whole world. Such books proved popular, as English readers seemed particularly to crave news from the outside world, especially the Americas. While the first geographies were of relatively poor quality, by the 1660s, writers and publishers were churning out massive, multivolume accounts of the places and peoples that populated the entire known world. For readers most interested in the New World, however, geographies only partly satisfied their desire for knowledge. To this end, geographies focusing only on the New World or the English colonies proliferated toward the end of the seventeenth century. Special geographies were books that helped English readers understand the wider world, 1 its diverse peoples and their own potential role in it. Through them, English readers came to a greater understanding of the newly discovered Americas in particular and England’s efforts there. In no other European country were books on the New World published as frequently as they were England. While many European countries were interested in the Americas, in England reading about the New World proved especially popular. In England, as well, emigration to the New World would take place on a comparatively grand scale. English people were far more likely to read about the world in books written in the vernacular for an audience that was expressly English. Disseminating such knowledge was a stated goal of geographic works, but it was not their only aim. Geographies also were an exercise in articulating Englishness during the politically tumultuous seventeenth century. While asserting nationalism through the written word was nothing new in Europe, the geography book was a peculiarly English way of doing it. In writing about the world beyond their shores, the English also wrote about themselves. In doing so, they harnessed the dynamic power of New World exploration and the printing press in a unique way. This study will trace the intertwined histories of geography as an academic discipline, early print culture, and English conquest and colonization in the New World to show how these seeming disparate pursuits were indeed bound together in the figure of the geography book. Geography and cartography were practiced throughout Europe, but in England geography became utterly commonplace, and books describing the world written in the vernacular were among the best-selling books there during the seventeenth century. English books also mentioned the Americas far more often than those written elsewhere. While scholars have lavished attention on maps, far less attention has been placed on textual descriptions, which were equally popular in the seventeenth century and arguably did much more to educate readers about the world. Through them, the growing number of English readers could see their place in the world, and imagine how they might enlarge it. The work of defining first England and next its empire was done in part through print culture. Learning geography was both an intellectual pursuit and a political maneuver. In early modern Europe, a geographic revolution took place that changed the way the Europeans represented and described the world and altered the way they thought of themselves. Starting in the fifteenth century, navigational techniques improved to the point where ocean crossings and transatlantic contacts became commonplace. Accordingly, Europeans’ sense of 2 the world was remade through a “shift from a dominant spatial model in which the Mediterranean centre of the world was poised against a liminal, uncivilized and possibly non- human periphery” to one that “transcribed the earthly globe into a vast pictorial frame circumscribing a space ready for European inscription.”1 The European discovery of the Americas conjures up images of daring explorers and the monarchs for whom they sailed. This view obscures the extent to which countless others who would never cross the Atlantic or own land in the Americas were also participants in a radical new way of thinking about the world. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the improved accuracy in
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