From Mare Tenebrorum to Atlantic Ocean: Creating the modern Atlantic World through Cartographical Writing (1470-1800)

CARLA LOIS

Cambridge, USA

Otro; The International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World 1500-1825; 2009

Harvard University

I assumed that the new image of the world cannot be explained only by new geographical evidence. That process could be explained by the combination of, at least, three sources: new geographical data; inherited geographical concepts; and the political necessities and ambitions of European imperial powers. What I was interested the most was that while more and more new empirical data were available, scholars had to reformulate the concepts which underpinned terrestrial geography. Those reformulations in turn offered a conceptual platform and an epistemological matrix for the discipline of geography. In particular I analyzed the theoretical debate about the geographical nature of the New World (basically the conceptual debate on the implications of being an island or a continent). The point I tried to rescue was what mapmakers really thought about their geography. They made different interpretations relying on their background information and they made a huge effort to make compatible existing knowledge and new data. So, what kind of geography did they have in their minds? With similar questions –or better, from the same perspective- I examine the geographical configuration of the Atlantic Ocean. I mostly relied on maps and science books, where I look for some traces about the geographical imagination on the Atlantic Ocean. Geographical imagination should be understood as a much shared common geographical sense. That implies to ask about how political, cultural and social imperatives have shaped ideas about geography and space, and how theses ideas have in turn influenced history and culture.