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| Longitude and Empire |
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How Captain Cook's Voyages Changed the World
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Brian W. Richardson
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$85.00 Hardcover
Release Date: 5/24/2005
ISBN: 9780774811897
$32.95 Paperback
Release Date: 6/1/2006
ISBN: 9780774811903
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| 256 Pages |
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| OTHER WAYS TO ORDER |
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About the Book
Shortlisted, 2007 Harold Adams Innis Prize,The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Before Captain Cook’s three voyages, to Europeans the globe was uncertain and dangerous; after, it was comprehensible and ordered. Written as a conceptual field guide to the voyages, Longitude and Empire offers a significant rereading of both the expeditions and modern political philosophy. More than any other work, printed accounts of the voyages marked the shift from early modern to modern ways of looking at the world. The globe was no longer divided between Europeans and savages but populated instead by an almost overwhelming variety of national identities.
Cook’s voyages took the fragmented and obscure global descriptions available at the time and consolidated them into a single, comprehensive textual vision. Locations became fixed on the map and the people, animals, plants, and artifacts associated with them were identified, collected, understood, and assimilated into a world order. This fascinating account offers a new understanding of Captain Cook’s voyages and how they affected the European world view.
About the Author(s)
Brian W. Richardson is a librarian at Windward Community College in Hawaii and is editing a collection of Hawaiian myths and legends.
Table of Contents
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introductions /3
The Story
The Book
The Author
1. Points
Rules of Exploration
Points along a Coast
The Coordinate System
Verification of Details
The Possibilities of Location
2. Shapes
Grand Divisions
Extreme Places
The Oceanic Plane
Cook’s Turn to Islands
Landscapes and Maps
The Move to Interiors
3. Nations
The Orient, the Savage, and Europe
The Primacy of Place
Studying Nations
Classifying Nations
Explaining Nations
The Savage, the Noble Savage, and the Nation
4. States
Hobbes
Locke
Rousseau
The Scottish Enlightenment
The Native State in Cook’s Voyages
Kant
Finding and Creating the Territorial Nation-State
5. Collections
The Cabinets of Curiosities
Collecting Nations
The Practices of the Collection
Boredom and the Collection
The Dangers of Relativism
The Persistence of Extreme Otherness
The Transcendence of the Collector
6. Empires
Cook and Empire
Empire As Collection
Empire As Exchange
Empire As Cultivation
Empire As Panopticon
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
Longitude and Empire is cogently and quite brilliantly organized. In summarizing how Cook organized his narratives, Brian Richardson shows how our world view has been shaped by Cook’s – a fascinating and well-illustrated argument. Cook and his narratives are the template for most if not all who followed, and as such, this critical assessment of Cook and the literature has importance beyond the man and his own explorations – this is an essential book for anyone interested in the general subject of Enlightenment exploration – and perhaps for all exploration that follows.
-- James Delgado, Director, Vancouver Maritime Museum
But it is a mark of the achievement of this wide-ranging book that it prompts such fundamental questions and asks us to look again not just at Cook and his voyages, but also at the character of the culture which produced the grid-like view of the world of which Cook, the cartographer par excellence, was the great exponent.
-- John Gascoigne, Journal of Pacific History, Fall 2005
Richardson gives a clear and readable narrative about the importance of the concept of space and its relationship to people in Cook’s narratives and the influence this concept had on British perceptions of the world. The relationship between theory-driven and empirically-motivated political thought in the aftermath of Cook’s voyages is particularly clear and interesting.
-- Margaret Small, Journal for Maritime Research
Employing only minimal jargon and offering clear… explanations, Richardson analyses the text of Cook’s Voyages and interprets their impact upon the European mind and political order in a manner that might profitably be emulated by cultural theorists and literary deconstructionists… Anthropologists such as Anne Salmond and Greg Dening have provided studies of early contacts between Pacific Natives and European largely from the former’s point of view. Richardson’s thought-provoking study reverses the lens to show the impact upon European sensibilities and growing conception of the world as a unified and precisely definable whole.
-- Merrill Distad, University of Alberta, Bulletin of Pacific Affairs, no. 14, October 2005.
A key contribution of this book is a proper examination of the ways in which Cook’s geographical thinking came to shape how we think historically and ethnographically about the whole world.
Katrina Schlunke, University of Techonology Sydney, Australian Historical Studies, October 2006, no. 128
Brian W. Richardson’s Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyage Changed the World is an intricately researched, incredibly detailed account of the voyages of Captain James Cook and the ways in which these voyages shaped how Europeans could know the world. ...To his credit, Richardson leaves very few stones unturned in his study of the voyages of one of the Europe’s most important explorers. ... There is much in this book that clearly is relevant to a broad audience including students of critical geography, imperialism, and global politics.
- Roxanne Lynn Doty, Arizona State University, Theory & Event, Vol. 11:1, 2008
Sample Chapter
Front Matter and Chapter One
Related Topics
History
History > Maritime
Other Ways To Order
In Canada, order your copy of Longitude and Empire from UTP Distribution at:
UTP Distribution
5201 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3H 5T8
Phone orders: 1(800)565-9523 or (416)667-7791
Fax orders: 1(800)221-9985 or (416)667-7832
Email: utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca
Ordering information for customers outside Canada
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