Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830

Abstract Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760–1830 seeks to establish what literate British people understood by the word ‘Europe’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It achieves this objective through detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias. Largely neglected by historians, these materials were widely read by contemporaries and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain. The book therefore traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts; it moves away from an approach to intellectual history concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers. The opening two chapters outline the characteristics and popularity of geography books and explain how they structure geographical knowledge. The remaining chapters explore eight themes which frame how Europe is understood in British culture. A chapter each is devoted to religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the ‘centre’ and ‘edges’ of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change. Each chapter shows how geographical texts use these intricate concepts to communicate and construct widely understood ideas about the European continent. Is Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where are the edges of Europe? Is Europe primarily a commercial network or are there common political practices too? Is Britain itself a European country? By showing how these and other questions were discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, the book provides a thorough and much-needed historical analysis of Britain’s enduringly complex intellectual relationship with Europe.