| dc.description.abstract | This thesis maps the different geographical processes by which people in Enlightenment
Edinburgh encountered, understood and ordered space. It analyses the knowledge-making
practices that were an integral part of Enlightenment reasoning, and that contributed to the
construction of Edinburgh’s identity as an Enlightenment capital. In particular, it focuses on
four aspects of mapping: planning, surveying, travelling, and compiling. The thesis explores
how people in Enlightenment Edinburgh made sense of their city, their environs, their nation,
and their world via these placed and place-making geographical processes. It focuses
intimately on the work of planners, surveyors, travellers and compilers. It is concerned,
moreover, with the transmission of plans, surveys, travel accounts and geographical
compilations, and with the people who constituted a receptive commercial audience for
them. The discussion makes use of a diverse range of sources, including manuscript maps of
the New Town and the confessional diary of a hack writer, but it is primarily based on the
substantial business ledgers of two Edinburgh booksellers, which cover the period 1771-
1809. By analysing the production and performance of the geographical works that were
bought by the city’s inhabitants, this thesis demonstrates that Enlightenment mapping was
the process by which the authority of vernacular spatial knowledges was replaced by a
professedly ‘scientific’ paradigm. By emphasising the vernacular subjectivities of the
production and performance of Enlightenment maps, however, the thesis denaturalises and
challenges the legacy of Enlightenment. | en |
