This innovative book explores how the making of Edinburgh as an influential Enlightenment capital depended on a series of spatial processes that extended across urban, regional, national and global scales. Edinburgh was an Enlightenment city of regional, national and global influence. But how did the people of Enlightenment Edinburgh understand and order their world? How did they encounter, compare and produce different kinds of spaces, from the urban to the world scale? And how did this city set the universal standards by which other places should be judged and transformed? The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh answers these questions by exploring the thousands of urban plans, county surveys, travel accounts and encyclopaedias that passed through a busy Edinburgh bookshop over four decades. It reveals how these geographical publications were produced and shared, and sheds light on the people who bought and used them - including moral philosophers, silk merchants, school teachers, ship's surgeons and slave owners. This is the story of how specific methods of mapping space came ultimately to predict and organize it, creating a new world in Edinburgh's image. By connecting global processes of knowledge production to intimate accounts of its reception in the city, this book deepens our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and the world it made.

About the Author
PHIL DODDS is a researcher in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University, Sweden.

Reviews
A rich and highly original interpretation of geography and print culture in late eighteenth-century Edinburgh. * Richard B. Sher, author of The Enlightenment and the Book *
Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh is destined to become a landmark book for scholars of the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment and the urban history of science. * Stephane Van Damme, Professor, Ecole Normale Superieure *
The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh represents a substantial contribution to Enlightenment studies, the history of geography, and historical-cultural geography. It merits attention from scholars and students in each of these fields, and from historians of science concerned with scientific practice in the Age of Reason. * ISIS: A JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE SOCIETY *
Highly readable and well-structured with subtle and convincing arguments, critically but sympathetically marshalling evidence from a range of historical figures from book readers and subscribers to travellers, geographers and natural philosophers whose personalities are winningly conveyed. Dodds' approach provides an exciting template of how similar local to global studies of Enlightenment towns might be undertaken. * SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL *



Book Information
ISBN 9781783277032
Author Dr Phil Dodds
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint The Boydell Press
Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Weight(grams) 1g