Charting an Empire
Geography at the English Universities 1580-1620
(University of Chicago Press, 1997)
ART 376
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.
(Description Source: University of Chicago Press)
Author
Lesley B. Cormack is Deputy Vice Chancellor and Principal at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). Before this, she was a Dean at the University of Alberta and at Simon Fraser University. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 1988 and taught at the University of Alberta in the Department of History and Classics for 17 years. She is a historian of early modern science, specializing in geography and mathematics in 16th-century England, and the author of Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620 and co-editor with Andrew Ede of A History of Science in Society: A Reader.
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Paper ISBN: 9780226116075
Cloth ISBN: 9780226116068
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