Mapping

doi:10.1017/9781009424264.004

Chapter 2 - Mapping

Cheap Maps, Spatial Politics, and England’s Colonies

from Part I - Origins Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025

Kat Lecky

Edited by

Elizabeth Evans

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Elizabeth Evans: Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit

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Summary

This chapter engages with the seventeenth-century explosion of cheap print pocket maps in England: affordable, broadly accessible cartographic materials owned, used, and dreamt with by the mass of ordinary people often forgotten by the grand sweep of history, who carried them as travel aids as they worked to better their financial circumstances. Domestic English pocket maps first came to the market in 1590 and targeted an expansive public sphere that included the marginally literate. These cartographic affordances also rose to prominence over a century characterized by the nation’s rapid imperial expansion. I offer case studies of the first miniature maps printed in England depicting its early American colonies, which offered up the economic resources of its new territories to broad audiences invested in upward mobility and personal wealth. At a time when cheap print seminally redefined the knowledge of what was common to the colonial commonwealth, small-format cartography mapped the rhizomatic growth of an everyday empire grounded in commercial concerns and seeded with private interests, even as drama, poetry, and prose took up this spatial imaginary to celebrate the cornucopianism at the core of this populist geography.

Keywords

spatial politics pocket maps colonial cartography global imaginaries John Speed

Type: Chapter
Information: Space and Literary Studies , pp. 34 - 51

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009424264.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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