Description
Book SynopsisThis fascinating account offers a new understanding of Captain Cook’s voyages and how they affected the European world view.
Trade ReviewBut 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 *
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, No. 128 *
Table of ContentsContents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introductions / 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
