Miles Ogborn

Writing travels: power, knowledge and ritual on the English East India Company’s early voyages

Most discussions of the relationships between ‘the East’, ‘the West’ and writing have, following Edward Said, involved interpreting the representations of people and places within travel writing, novels and other literary forms. This paper argues that this restricted engagement with practices of reading and writing limits the ways in which the relationships between people involved in the global geographies constructed since the fifteenth century can be understood. Through presenting a detailed discussion of the role of royal letters within the voyages of the English East India Company in the early seventeenth century, it argues that an analysis of ‘how writing travels’ which concentrates on the production, carriage and use of texts as material objects can foreground the active and collective making of global geographies as a contested enterprise involving multiple agents in a variety of sites. This paper presents writing as a global cultural practice and traces its place in the making of an early modern trading network.

Editorial: Atlantic geographies

Turning towards the Atlantic means, at the very least, a thorough reorientation of the historical and geographical frames within which the social and cultural geographies of past and present can be understood (Cook 2000, 2004). As the papers collected here suggest, Atlantic geographies require perspectives that can encompass spatialities that include but exceed those of the local or of the nation-state, and historical periodizations that are attentive to the long term and to dynamic, circumnavigatory flows that disrupt notions of progress and development. Studying Atlantic geographies means opening perspectives on a social, cultural and spatial arena which has to be considered as a complex unity, but which also needs to be differentiated in terms of the many journeys, peoples, ways of life, ideas and materials that have been brought together in both violent and productive ways in the Atlantic world. Considering the Atlantic as the space of investigation, unlike other otherwise complementary approaches to transnationalism or diasporic space, also suggests an attention to the environment or the material world. It signals a geography defined not simply by the movements of people, but of the winds and ocean currents, and of the connection and transformation of different ecological zones, and the materials that they have provided for cultivation, production and consumption. There are, however, many different ways of investigating these Atlantic geographies, and a range of difficulties involved in doing so. Within a European periodization, the construction of the Atlantic world was an early modern phenomenon. It was made through the combined but unequal labour, knowledge and investment of the peoples living around its rim and moving across its depths and shallows from the late fifteenth century onwards. For example, John Thornton (1998) and others have shown how African men and women were a vital part of its making, in Africa, the Americas and Europe: as slave traders as well as the enslaved; as consumers as well as workers; as discoverers as well as the discovered; and as active contributors to the new hybrid intercultures of the oceanic zone (Brooks 2003; Hall 1992; Northrup 2002). In turn, Marcus Rediker (1987) has argued that Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 6, No. 3, June 2005

Transforming Metropolitan London 1750-1960

Charles Baudelaire, the lyric poet of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, reminds the urban historian that the metric for the rapidly changing form of the city is not simply the achievement of planners’ visions or the rise and fall of land values but the vagaries of the human heart. Canvasing both urban poetics and politics, but shifting the focus to London, the articles in this issue are all concerned with the transformation of the metropolis in the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. They seek to map out and exemplify new ways of approaching the cultural history of the English capital, as well as revisiting more well established questions about the nature of urban planning, environmental reform, and the experience of modern metropolitan life. The collection began as a symposium on histories of urban change, held in London in July 2002. This was one of a series of meetings funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council under the title ‘‘Transforming London: Rethinking Regeneration through Commerce, Planning and Art.’’ The discussions, involving both academics and practitioners, focused on the dynamic interaction between civic, commercial, and cultural programs that have shaped and continue to shape lives and landscapes in the

Streynsham Master's office: accounting for collectivity, order and authority in 17th-century India

This paper examines the uses of writing in early modern global trade in order to argue for the constitutive role of inscription practices in the making of the social and spatial relations of mercantile capitalism. At the heart of this is a detailed study of the reform of the accounting and bookkeeping practices of the English East India Company at Fort St George carried out by Streynsham Master (1640–1724) in the late 17th century. This is used to show that the collective decision-making, social and moral order, and relationships of respect upon which the Company relied were constructed in and through the factorys consultation books, accountancy ledgers and the letters sent between England and India. This paperwork was part of the making of institutional structures and spaces which worked through a series of divisions between ‘public’ and ‘private’, and which made the ‘logic’ of mercantile capital evident to the Companys servants.

Book Review: Lost geographies of power

boundaries and transnational regions with the intention of examining these phenomena through the lens of political geography. The authors are quite good at integrating practical examples taken from their own research in highlighting and explaining their main concepts. Of note is Till’s chapter which provides a strong overview of the literature related to place, memory and national commemorations. Part V, ‘Geographies of political and social movements’, examines the geographic roles and outcomes of political parties, religious movements, nationalism, citizenship and sexual politics. Scholars who contributed to this section include Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie, Colin H. Williams, R. Scott Appleby, Eleonore Kofman and Gill Valentine. Electoral geographers, and those concerned with identification and group identities, will find this section helpful. The final part, ‘Geographies of environmental politics’, looks at the geopolitics of nature, environmental issues, resources and the emergence of a planetary environmental politics. Contributing authors are Noel Castree, Simon Dalby, Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low, and Karen T. Litfin. Important issues covered in this section include environmental justice and the exploration of a green geopolitics. In conclusion, I encourage anyone with an interest in political geography to purchase or borrow this book. Space limitations prevent me from giving each chapter a thorough review but, if any of the topics and ideas relayed in this review strike a chord with you, please seek this book out. There is a need for more works like this in political geography. It is a field undergoing rapid growth and, with that growth, questions about the nature of the subdiscipline, and the theoretical and applied direction it is moving in, will abound. In finding answers to those questions, and in proposing new questions, this volume is highly recommended.

This is London! How d'ye like it?.

MARK HALLETT, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth. London and New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1999, 259 pp., illustrations, bibliography, £40.00 cloth. TONY HENDERSON, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830. London: Longman, 1999, 226 pp., bibliography, £12.99 paper. ELAINE A. REYNOLDS, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 235 pp., bibliography,

Teaching qualitative historical geography

49.50 cloth. CYNTHIA WALL, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 277 pp., illustrations, bibliography, £37.50 cloth.

Book review symposium: Duncan, J.S. 2007: In the shadow of the tropics: climate, race and biopower in nineteenth century Ceylon. Aldershot: Ashgate

Abstract This paper discusses the teaching of qualitative historical geography through the consideration of a course taught at the University of Salford entitled ‘Sources, Problems and Interpretation in Historical Geography’. The development of one part of the course, a ‘module’ on Victorian Britain using discussion group activity to interpret various sources, is detailed showing how its form is the product of the overall course aims, my own geographical education and a theoretical position which involves a dialogue between qualitative methods in contemporary human geography and historical geography.

Book Review: The badlands of modernity: heterotopia and social ordering

Commentary 1 I should begin by saying that I greatly enjoyed James Duncan’s book. I am particularly admiring of the way in which he has brought South Asia’s plantation societies within the discursive framework of colonial governmentality and appreciative of the effective way in which he moves between multiple spatialities – from the plantation bungalow to the othered tropics – while at the same time engaging with the stark materiality of plantation labour. By declining to treat colonialism as a monolith, as a ‘project’ that had only to be articulated to be somehow realized, he provides us with a subtle framing of power, in which climate, gender, race, science and medicine, cattle-trespass and even coffee ‘rust’ form integral parts. Instead of a colonial situation in which there is a simple opposition between Europeans and indigenes, here is a far more problematic set of variables, in which the colonial administration, the planters, the Sinhalese peasants and the Tamil estate labourers all have different agendas, their own existential woes. I found illuminating, too, the inclusion of the environment in the colonial ordering of the tropical world. The achievement of the book is to greatly advance a sense of the interconnected worlds symbolized by, as much as contained within, the plantation. But, that said, I think Duncan’s study does raise issues that are not easily resolved. First, the question of modernity. Was nineteenth-century Ceylon ‘modern’? In some senses, it was indisputably so. It could boast a modern bureaucracy, backed by laws, courts and police; an economy, dominated for half a century by coffee production, intimately linked to world markets and commodity prices and sustained by immigrant labour; it had botanists and doctors; it even had an eco-system that fell prey fi rst to massive deforestation, then to the modern peregrinations of coffee blight. Planters from half a world away, however isolated they might feel, mobilized capital and recruited foreign labour; they lobbied governments, sought scientific assistance, wrote memoirs and took photographs (if only, suggestively, of women workers). Even their views on ‘race’ might be said to refl ect the ideological underpinnings and scientific pretensions of their age. In such a context Duncan’s invocation of governmentality as a modern expression of power makes a good deal of sense. With reassuring symmetry he begins the book (p. 1) by quoting Foucault’s description of a modern regime of power as seeking ‘to break up the patches of darkness that blocked the light [and] eliminate the shadowy areas of society’, and ends (p. 189) by quoting him once more, again referring to those same mechanisms’ ‘capillary forms of existence’, situated at ‘the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and

Book Review: Art for the nation: exhibitions and the London public, 1747-2001

The badlands that this book inhabits are those which lie between sociology and cultural geography. For some they are marginal to the concerns of either discipline. For others, such as Kevin Hetherington, they are places where different orderings of social theories of society, space and modernity, and of social ordering itself, might be forged which, in time, could transform what is taken to be mainstream in both disciplines. What Hetherington himself seeks out in these lands is Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which he defines as ‘spaces of alternate ordering’. Through the chapters of this book the idea of heterotopia is explored and refined in relation to other elements of social and spatial theory, and exemplified and redescribed through three instances of ‘the space of modernity’: the Palais Royal in Paris, the eighteenth-century Masonic lodge and Britain’s early factories. It is a project which self-consciously seeks to offer new alternatives. Yet it ends up replaying some rather conventional and limited versions of geography and modernity, and the connections between them. Hetherington suggests that the term ’heterotopia’ can be used to describe a certain sort of space: a space that is ordered in a way different from those around it. As spaces characterized by alternate modes of spatial ordering, they then reveal new possibilities and can become the sites of social change. This comes in part from Foucault’s short discussion of heterotopia as places of Otherness and of unsettling juxtaposition. Hetherington then supplements this with Louis Marin’s notion of ‘utopics’ to define the alternate ordering as a promising although always deferred state, and Bruno Latour’s idea of ‘obligatory points of passage’ to suggest how some spaces become important places. He also defines heterotopia against other accounts of space within social theory: representational space, the margins, paradoxical space and liminality. These, he argues, are more problematic, often sharing a romance of the margins, resistance and transgression as the opposite to order, rather than identifying spaces which order in other ways. The task then becomes one of identifying heterotopic places: are they few or many? Hetherington refuses to accept the idea that every space might be heterotopic, each ordered in different ways from the others. However, the price of doing so is to suggest that heterotopias are relatively rare and can