Utopian geography is an imaginative projection undergirded by actual—though vague—spatial coordinates. As I have explained, early modern utopias almost always adopted the conceit of a distant voyager returning to tell of strange new lands. Utopias, therefore, were conceived primarily in geographic terms, and geography itself was imbued with speculations and fantasies. This coupling loosened as travelers, compilers, mathematicians, and mapmakers published increasingly detailed and accurate information about the globe for wider readerships. From the beginning, however, there was tension between the conjectural nature of utopias and the more empirical basis of geography. Furthermore, by their nature, utopias were oppositional and insular; geography tended to naturalize and constellate the very spaces where utopias might be situated. The subject of the present chapter is this unraveling, which occurred gradually and only incompletely over the century and a half leading up to the novels discussed in the ensuing chapters.
Since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the genre contained the beginnings of novelistic skepticism, a counterweight to uncritical belief in tall tales of societal perfection. Thus Susan Bruce, invoking Michael McKeon (Origins), observes that More “engages very directly with some of the epistemological and social questions which the novel has been understood to confront and formulate” (xvii). More and Francis Bacon employed faraway settings to make their fictions logically possible. They sought one among many readerly positions between total belief and total disbelief. Still, they remained unsatisfied with distance alone and imagined surrounding barricades to protect their utopian citizenries and block foreign influences. Travelers had reported much that was strange but true, yet both writers understood that geographic seclusion was undermined by its very condition of possibility: overseas discovery and the political and commercial interconnections that attended it.
From the late fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, European geographers had done much to approximate the globe’s continental littorals, and a succession of western European nations—Portugal, Spain, Holland—ventured east and west to set up more and less tenuously held commercial trading posts and imperial territories. Eventually, France and England, too, established significant footholds overseas and began taking in plentiful new ideas and objects from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The height of the British Empire came later, as did the rise of the “West,” but the wider circulation and intermingling of cultural influences, along with the sheer facts of egress and ingress, sent utopia farther to the margins, farther to edges of the map and farther to the edges of the imagination. The process was ongoing—but ultimately unfinished. Daniel Defoe, in his New Voyage Round the World (1724), an imitation of a voyage narrative, could predict that in the still-mysterious South Seas future navigators would “discover new Worlds, new Nations, and new inexhaustible Funds of Wealth and Commerce, such as never were yet known to the Merchants of Europe” (The Novels 10:131). The belief could not be disproved, though in Defoe’s other novels, and in the early novel more generally, utopian geographies came under heavy scrutiny. Indeed, as we shall see, this attitude of disenchantment was better suited to fiction, which was blind to the wonders of actual travel and could more easily employ a prospective realism and anticipatory logic that universalized the familiar.
I start with Utopia, in which the pretense of a voyage introduces the island as an actual discovery, a new world beyond the New World, plausible perhaps but only because readers could not disprove it conclusively, or could not disprove the general idea of it. Raphael Hythlodaeus, often viewed as a double for More, is also a double for Amerigo Vespucci, with whom he supposedly sailed on Vespucci’s final three voyages. The influence of the Italian explorer, the first to describe the Americas as a major landmass separate from Asia, has been persuasively demonstrated (Cave). “Eager to see the world,” Hythlodaeus claims to have remained “at the farthest point of the last voyage” before pushing onward, over water and land, to “towns and cities and very populous commonwealths,” all of them mentioned only cursorily (4:51–53). He and his crew journey farther still, “under the equator,” through a “gloomy and dismal region,” and finally to more hospitable climes, where they find undiscovered “peoples, cities, and towns which maintain a continual traffic by sea and land”—though not beyond the intervening space that isolates them (4:53). Somewhere along the way lies Utopia, its location impossible to pinpoint or even approximate.1 The return voyage completes a full circumnavigation, before Ferdinand Magellan’s, with stops at Ceylon and southern India, the lone reference points on the other side of the world—an expanse that remained generally underestimated. To bolster his claims, Hythlodaeus deploys many of the truth-telling conventions of actual travelers (Ghita) and builds new fictions on the ledges of existing facts (Hutchinson). The parerga both corroborates and undermines the testimony with maps, epistles, and even an alphabet (Leslie 25–80). Additionally, More inserts his traveler into not just Vespucci’s life but also his own, grafting their meeting onto an actual diplomatic mission to Antwerp and a meeting with Peter Giles. Utopia, it would seem, was merely a new horizon, a new periphery past but continuous with the rest of the world. Skeptics had doubted Vespucci, too, but they certainly did not dismiss him out of hand, and today he is remembered for positive discoveries, as well as fabrications. It is much easier, after all, to prove a positive than a negative. For many readers, blank oceanic spaces must have seemed less likely than islands and even continents, however fanciful.
We have been cautioned not to take More’s geography too literally. Louis Marin has expounded at length on the subtle contradictions that hinder any mimetic reading and frustrate our attempts to put the island on a map. For Marin, Utopia is a space of textual play, not representation. After all, the voyage is cryptically delineated, the recitation of it qualified by bad memory and uncertain navigation (Utopics 42–48, 99–111, 115–18). Hythlodaeus seems at once to leave this world for another but also to go nowhere at all. Certainly, the text abounds in verbal trickery, from its famous place-name to the name of its visitor, translated as “expert in trifles” or “well-learned in nonsense” (More 4:301–3, 301n48). Some have taken these disavowals as justification for viewing More’s text as an elaborate intellectual game (C. S. Lewis 168–70). Marin and Fredric Jameson argue otherwise, claiming passionately and convincingly that Utopia is no less engaged with the world, but that its method of engagement is indirect and incomplete—that it invites participation. More’s playfulness, seen this way, is a necessary linguistic freedom for the articulation of an ideology that could not be expressed any other way.2 As they argue, Utopia the text requires that we relinquish Utopia the place and undertake a critique that overcomes the rigidity of literal interpretation.
Nonetheless, the text could be a space of play partly because geography was itself a space of play—or at least earnest and contested speculation. More inherited and perpetuated this possibility, endowing unknown regions on the globe with all the plasticity and potentiality that Marin ascribes to the second half of the narrative. The New World was constructed by and constructive of many new forms of writing, and Utopia cannot be read separately from its context of exploration and commercial and imperial expansion (Hadfield 7–12; Balasopoulos, “Sea Change”; and “Unworldly”). At first, however, accounts of transatlantic travel drew on ancient and medieval writings (Grafton), and a legacy of exotic marvels persisted, fueling analogies between distance and difference and sustaining assumptions that the edges of the world were luminous and otherworldly (Campbell, Witness and the Other World 122–61; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Romm 215–22). We should not undervalue the contributions of Ptolemaic and Arabic geography or the early Portuguese and Spanish voyages, but most European maps were oriented toward what would later become the “East,” and as Jerry Brotton explains, late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cartography “deliberately exploited the partial and often conflictual accounts of distant territories to create politically and commercially compelling ‘imaginative geographies’ which convinced backers with a mixture of aesthetic beauty and loudly proclaimed scholarly wisdom” (182). In situating Utopia, More was inspired by Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, which was likewise inspired by Vespucci and is credited with the naming of “America.” The Waldseemüller map conveys the achievement and the limitations of contemporaneous geography by recognizing, but of course underestimating, the fully continental bodies of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (fig. 1). Whatever his interest in wide-open spaces, More himself slyly inveighs against “stale travelers’ wonders,” since “Scillas and Greedy Celaenos and folk-devouring Laestrygones and similar frightful monsters are common enough,” or more common than “well and wisely trained citizens” (4:53). The comment suggests a willingness to entertain political over natural wonders.
Crucially, Utopia’s difference is reinforced from within. If the society required distance to be conceivable, it requires seclusion to be self-directed. New voyages and discoveries must have made isolation seem possible, but such ventures made it less possible in the future, pulling relatively isolated places and settled identities into new and unpredictable entanglements. Preemptively, the Utopians defend their autonomy with natural and artificial barriers and a panoply of injunctions regulating citizens’ travel. In so doing, they bar the inward flow of influence, ensuring political stability and precluding the vicissitudes of history. Despite an earlier encounter, and the present one, the Utopians are divided from Europe by large, uncharted seas. They are separated from the less perfect nations surrounding them by rocky reefs and mazes of waterways that render the island all but unreachable by outsiders and inescapable by insiders. We will remember, moreover, that the founding of Utopia is coeval with its transformation from a peninsula into an island, when a channel is dug to separate it from the mainland. Although the island is not on any world map, More’s text inspired cartographic representations by Ambrosius Holbein, Abraham Ortelius, and others, all of whom depicted Utopia all by itself, untouched by a mainland and strategically fortified against neighboring countries (fig. 2).3 Their culture is further sheltered by a strenuously cultivated xenophobia that engenders abhorrence of the riches of visiting emissaries. This centripetal insularity has been read as a program to restrain individualism (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 37–47); as a meditation on England’s imperial inadequacy (Knapp 18–61); as a model for embryonic nationalism (Wegner 45–61); as a metaphor for purity and autonomy in humanist thought (Balasopoulos, “Utopia Insulae Figura”); and as a skeptical interrogation of the value of travel (Houston, “Traveling Nowhere”). Utopia’s isolation is also an imaginative undoing of the very overseas voyages that served as More’s inspiration and authorization. David Glimp argues, “More’s work offers a compensatory fantasy in response to damaging modes of globalization impacting early modern England and Western Europe, an extended effort to define a mode of governance organized around actively managing the polity’s contact with the world in order to maximize security” (263). Actually, More goes further, imagining a world where contact is virtually nonexistent, where one might be removed from all the communicative, commercial, and political interfaces that Vespucci and other voyagers initiated. The fantasy of perfection is also a fantasy of escape, achievable only beyond the imperfect world in our midst, only with defensive barriers against the reach of the unconverted.
Following More, Bacon began his New Atlantis (1627) with another distant voyage, as did Johann Valentin Andreae in Christianopolis (1619) and Tommaso Campanella in La Città del Sole (1623). In the New Atlantis, the anonymous narrator and his crew are sailing from Peru to China and Japan when they meet contrary winds and get lost “in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world,” also described as “that part of the South Sea [that] was utterly unknown; and might have islands or continents, that hitherto were not come to light” (Bacon 4:359–60). The sailors end up on one of these islands. Indeed, by the seventeenth century, the South Seas had become the utopian imagination’s most suggestive canvas (Fausett).
1. The Waldseemüller map. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION
Continually, Bacon praises “the remote discoveries and navigations of this last age” (4:374), which exert an obvious influence throughout the New Atlantis (Rennie 36–39, 43–50; Salzman; Houston, “‘An Idea’”). Besides the famous voyages, including Francis Drake’s celebrated circumnavigation (Thrower, Sir Francis Drake), cartographers such as Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator (Brotton 151–79) and geography writers such as Giovanni Botero (Headley) helped spread throughout Europe interest in and awareness of the larger non-European world. England, of course, had Richard Hakluyt the younger and later Samuel Purchas, both of whose voluminous compilations of travel writing promoted English interests in the New World (Bauer 77–117; Mancall). Now, young men at Oxford and Cambridge studied modern world geography, which prepared them for England’s first stage of successful overseas endeavors (Cormack). Actually, Bacon’s utopia has its own remote discoveries: as the Father of Solomon’s House says, every twelve years the institution sends forth explorers, called “Merchants of Light,” “whose errand was only to give us knowledge of the affairs and state of those countries to which they were designed, and especially of the sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world; and withal to bring unto us books, instruments, and patterns in every kind” (384). Accordingly, Timothy Reiss describes Bensalem as “an octopus, situated in a New World and sending its tentacles toward both the Old World and the quite unknown” (181). In what might be the signature utopian paradox, Bacon is famous for advocating a program of induction and proto-objectivity that would otherwise preclude utopian fantasies (Solomon 46–55; Daston and Park 220–31; Swann 68–74). Legends of the Old Atlantis are dismissed as “poetical and fabulous,” and generally Bacon aimed his energy against precisely the sort of differential space most utopias presupposed (4:377). He and his contemporaries were heirs to the concept of “the unity of the sea” (Parry ix). Generally, they wanted to demystify exotic geography and turn it to use, specifically English use. Bacon has thus become an avatar of not just science but the power he believed it entailed, leading numerous commentators to view the New Atlantis as an allegory for the twinned expansion of knowledge and empire.4 Bensalem, unlike Utopia, was imagined during a time when England was embarking upon real colonial ventures in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake and Massachusetts Bays, a time of quickening circuits of commerce and influence (Beckles; Horn; V. Anderson). Bacon himself took part in colonial projects, in Virginia and Newfoundland. As the narrator says, “All nations have inter-knowledge one of another either by voyage into foreign parts, or by strangers that come to them: and though the traveller into a foreign country doth commonly know more by the eye, than he that stayeth at home can by the relation of the traveller; yet both ways suffice to make a mutual knowledge, in some degree, on both parts” (4:374).
2. Holbein’s map of Utopia. © TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Bensalem, however, is the exception to this rule, its isolation depending less on an accident of geography than on a concerted effort to remain separate and hidden. When the narrator and his shipmates reach the harbor, a party of Bensalemites waves them off and forbids them to land, then legally limits the duration of their stay and confines them to the “Stranger’s House.” The intention is “preserving the good which cometh by communicating with strangers, and avoiding the hurt” (4:382). Once trusted, the Europeans are invited to stay, which they are sorely tempted to do, and it turns out that Bensalem has a policy of retention to prevent visitors from reporting about the island. We never learn its exact location, just that it is “beyond both the old world and the new,” accessible to the narrator by a “miracle,” “marvel,” “some rare accident” (4:367, 374, 380). He admits surprise “never [to have] heard of any ship of theirs that had been seen to arrive upon any shore of Europe; no, nor either of the East or West Indies; nor yet of any ship of any other part of the world that had made return from them” (4:374). His ignorance is due to Bensalem’s “laws of secrecy” and its “rare admission of strangers,” so that the nation’s people, or at least its special class of scientists, “know well most part of the habitable world, and are themselves unknown” (4:370). Obviously, this is a position of superiority, yet there is as much anxiety here as dominance, anxiety over being yoked within a larger sphere of unpredictable and uncontrollable exchanges. Just then, English soldiers, colonists, merchants, and diplomats were traveling farther and wider, bringing into being a new English cosmopolitanism (Games). As Sarah Hogan puts it, “The island’s position within and apart from the world is a spatial fantasy where the highly regulated borders of the island figure a desire for national, absolute territory, and these borders are only to be transgressed for the purpose of accumulation” (45). Bensalem’s travelers are vigilant to conduct their reconnaissance covertly, and the Father of Solomon’s House refuses to divulge their methods—one of many closely kept secrets. We do learn that the travel reports are processed and filtered through a long line of oddly named intermediaries: “Depredators,” “Mystery-men,” “Pioners or Miners,” “Compilers,” “Dowry-men or Benefactors,” “Lamps,” “Inoculators,” and finally “Interpreters of Nature.” Only some of the resulting knowledge reaches Bensalem’s general public, which is even more carefully guarded than More’s Utopians. Bacon may look to the future, as later writers would, yet he was chary of unintended consequences. He ascribed a major role to geography in the shaping of history: geography both as an object of knowledge and as a situation in space for either acquiring or escaping knowledge. As much as Bensalem depends on its navigational prowess, it depends as well on the navigational inferiority of the rest of the world—a strategic advantage Bacon could only dream of for England.
During England’s interregnum, political upheaval and a unique zeal for reform produced an efflorescence of utopian writing, though the target of this work was not some distant horizon but England and the American colonies. With an earnest readiness for application, these utopias shed generic protocols and made the convention of the journey either superficial or unnecessary.5 Their directness has drawn numerous champions. In Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981), for instance, J. C. Davis devotes lengthy chapters to Samuel Gott, Gerrard Winstanley, and James Harrington, and significantly he ends his survey at 1700, noting in the century’s final decades a “waning confidence in the will or capacity of the state” (366). Davis’s periodization makes sense, given his definition of utopia as a “‘realistic’ or tough-minded” engagement with the basic problem of “limited satisfactions exposed to unlimited wants”—as opposed to unfeasible fantasies of inexhaustible resources or somehow natural abstemiousness (37). Others, too, have considered these utopias “action-minded” (Shklar, “Political Theory” 107) and “action-oriented” (Thomas, “Utopian Impulse” 24). Whatever the approach or conclusion, many have adopted or only modestly revised Davis’s periodization. James Holstun, Amy Boesky, Marina Leslie, and Robert Appelbaum wind down their major studies around the end of the seventeenth century, reinforcing the assumption that utopian thought takes a downward turn sometime after the Restoration.6
Later in the century, when the voyage convention was redeployed, the bounds of utopia tended to slacken and collapse, revealing inside a microcosm of what is outside or allowing the outer world to pour in and contaminate what was hitherto cloistered and perfect. For instance, Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668) begins as an idealization of the state of nature and the possibility of unlimited sexual pleasure, male pleasure, but so much procreation results in demographic conditions ripe for factionalism and civil war—haunting memories of England’s recent past.7 The island’s prince reflects that “it is impossible, but that in multitudes disorders will grow, the stronger seeking to oppress the weaker; no type of Religion being strong enough to chain up the depraved nature of mankind” (Claeys, Restoration and Augustan British Utopias 124). By contrast, A Description of New Athens (1720) uses spatial dislocation to imagine a time capsule of ancient Greece, slightly updated, but geography can do nothing to prevent history from repeating itself: Old Athens fell because of “Inundations of barbarous Nations,” and New Athens has its own barbarians at the gate (Claeys, Utopias of the British Enlightenment 49). Both of these utopias are located outside history, at least temporarily. They look to the past nostalgically, putting little faith in forward-leaning social renovations, even when such renovations must have seemed desperately necessary. This line of thinking is typical during the period, as we shall see.8 Many writers laid stress on separation as the lone guarantor of utopian possibility, though strict and lasting separation was getting harder to imagine.
The decline of utopian geographies is partly attributable to broad historical circumstances, particularly changing states of knowledge about the world and the extension of trade routes and the growth of overseas colonies. This was an age of significant geographic discovery, directed by sophisticated navigational and cartographic practices, but more than that it was an age when new information was disseminated more widely than ever within a burgeoning marketplace hungry for travel accounts and geographic compendia, for world maps and globes. Moreover, projects of commercial and imperial expansion instrumentalized geographic knowledge and brought higher numbers of English travelers into direct and everyday contact with remote peoples and places. Such circumstances certainly bore on the settings of the early novel, validating new forms of representation that either directly or indirectly undercut utopian geographies. Nevertheless, the accumulation of knowledge and experience could not alone invalidate utopia. Voyagers rounded the globe with increasing frequency, but there was much they had not seen and even more they could not explain. Their accomplishments remained incomplete, especially before the explorations of the second half of the eighteenth century, culminating with the achievements of James Cook. At the time, the spread of English commercial and imperial authority was expansive only by England’s own standards; the nation was not yet the dominant power in Europe, and Europe was not yet the dominant power of the world. In what remains of this chapter, I will survey several of the major developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century geography, measuring knowledge and experience against the diminishing tenability of distant utopias.
The Royal Society, chartered in 1662, ushered in new attempts to guide and standardize geographic reconnaissance, much as Solomon’s House had. Instructions for travel were not new; in his essay “Of Travel” (1612), Bacon himself assembled a list of categories so that travelers would know “what things are worthy to be seen in the country where they go” (6:417). The Royal Society’s instructions, however, carried the backing of an institution, albeit a new and diffuse one, and its Fellows collected testimony from travelers and correspondents and then came up with further questions, forming a consistent feedback loop. Throughout the early numbers of the Philosophical Transactions (1665–), the Fellows of the Society, including Laurence Rooke, Robert Boyle, and Henry Oldenburg, issued directions for observation and documentation designed to replace what Oldenburg called “Romances or Panegyrics” with “severe, full and punctual Truth” (Oldenburg, “Preface” 552). These instructions encouraged travelers to enhance their observations with instruments, to organize their information according to new schema of classification, and to seek out and repudiate or explain the incredible reports of previous travelers.9 One of the chief purposes was to demystify global variety, to amass enough particulars in natural history to permit all-embracing theories in natural philosophy (Daston, “Description by Omission”). The influence of the instructions is hard to determine.10 Still, all the novelists discussed here, especially Defoe, were aware of the intersections between travel and the new sciences (I. Vickers 133–50). At the level of language, the Royal Society advocated a “plain” style of writing, rejecting “amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style” and endorsing instead “primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words” (Sprat 113).11 Such strictures would seem to leave little room for the expatiations of the utopian imagination. Universal language schemes (Slaughter; Stillman), some of them inspired by Chinese characters (Porter, Ideographia 15–77), took this one step further, aiming to align words and things into a perfect correspondence, to stretch language to the ends of the earth, and, more subtly, to reduce the earth to the basic units of language.
Voyage writers such as William Dampier helped establish and conventionalize these ideals. In his New Voyage Round the World (1697), along with the Voyage to New Holland (1703), Dampier grafted onto the scaffolding of a bare sea log a profusion of descriptions of exotic flora and fauna (Edwards 17–43; Neill 31–51). The contributions were more literary than scientific, but other travelers followed suit, for instance Lionel Wafer, in A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699), and Woodes Rogers, in A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712). These “voyages round the world” provided an abundance of facts about hitherto unknown regions; more fundamentally, they helped nudge into being the basis of the modern fact.12 By 1703, Martin Martin could announce, somewhat hyperbolically, “There’s a great Change in the Humour of the World, and by consequence in the way of Writing. Natural and Experimental Philosophy has been much improved … and therefore Descriptions of Countries without the Natural History of ’em, are now justly reckoned to be defective” (4). Dampier affirms that he visited locations “not only Remote, but for the most part little frequented” and that his intention was “to bring in [his] Gleanings here and there in Remote Regions, to that general Magazine, of the Knowledge of Foreign Parts” (New Voyage 1). Whatever the value of these gleanings, Hans Sloane, the Royal Society’s second secretary, praised the New Voyage in the Philosophical Transactions, calling its style “Intelligible and Expressive” (Sloane 426).
Even when they offered little that was new, travelers and publishers advertised newness, and travel narratives flooded the market. Dampier’s New Voyage became a runaway success, racing through three editions in the first year, four in the first two years, and seven by 1727. Dampier himself became a minor celebrity. Defoe obviously knew about him; he borrowed Dampier’s title verbatim for his final novel. Jonathan Swift satirized him, along with the wider craze for travelers’ tales. Over the course of the century, travel literature became one of the book trade’s most reliable bets, second only to religious tracts. Indeed, Philip Edwards estimates that two thousand voyage narratives came to print in eighteenth-century Britain (2). Awnsham and John Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704) and John Harris’s Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (1705) enticed readers by pulling numerous accounts together and bringing up to date the tradition of Hakluyt and Purchas. Going through multiple editions, such anthologies implied a collective momentum that presaged further—and farther—discoveries in the future.
Compendia of geographic descriptions offered readers a single source for detailed information about the globe as a totality. Of course, earlier publications did not advertise their limitations. The ancients, too, had models of the whole earth, and old myths died hard (Fernández-Armesto 252–54). Nonetheless, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the collection and dissemination, or actually the commercialization, of large stores of empirical knowledge that added substantially to prior frameworks and educated wider numbers of readers, including polite women and children.13 This knowledge is perhaps best gauged in “special geographies,” which purported to describe all the world’s known countries (Sitwell). The genre takes under its umbrella chorography and topography, terms that referred to smaller spatial scales, and encompasses the breadth of the globe by compiling and redacting descriptions and histories from various other sources. If new special geographies allowed for more difference in a quantitative sense, they militated against greater differences in a qualitative sense, integrating and comprehending diversity within a form that encouraged comparison and relativistic conclusions. This increase in knowledge, or rather its efficient collation, transmission, and diffusion, is readily observable in Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652), which went through six editions in its first twenty years and remained England’s authoritative geography text for the latter half of the seventeenth century. Heylyn’s enormous account included four sections, covering Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, with brief territorial descriptions that provided what Robert Markley calls “snapshot views of a world potentially open to ever-expanding trade” (Far East 58). The book’s range might be immense, but its perspective, its prejudices and concerns, are unmistakably European, and specifically English, silently indicating the country’s interests and prejudices, its focal points and blind spots (Mayhew). Patrick Gordon’s Geography Anatomiz’d, which went through twenty editions from 1693 to 1754, brought geography to a younger audience, reducing knowledge of the world to a “grammar,” a compact and learnable subject. As the preface advertises, the purpose was to “whet the Appetite of our Geographical Student for a Compleat Understanding of the Globe” (B3). With questions and answers and lists and tables, Geography Anatomiz’d encouraged problem solving and rote memorization, implying that all the world, even those parts that remained unknown, would eventually yield to existing forms of discovery and pedagogy. Also popular were pocket atlases, which pirated and condensed this information and made it inexpensive and portable. The circulation of all of these books helped produce what Charles Withers calls the Enlightenment’s “geographically aware publics,” what Martin Brückner calls early America’s “geographic literacy” (Withers, Placing the Enlightenment 5; Brückner 3). Put another way, we might find here the origins of a specifically geographic version of what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world,” an expurgation of utopian spaces in the name of “rationalization and intellectualization” (Vocation Lectures 30).
Such collections of national and regional descriptions inspired a willingness to build universal systems of knowledge, especially systems that explained civilizational differences. Compilers tended to organize their information into four categories of non-European regions: Asia, North America, West Africa, and the Pacific, immense areas represented with sometimes only minimal degrees of internal differentiation (Marshall and Williams 7–44). Herein lay the basis for early anthropology and modern conceptions of race (Hodgen; Wheeler). Later in the century, Edmund Burke proclaimed that “the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once,” an invocation of the theory of stadial human development (3:351). Geographic difference, once bound up tightly with climatological difference, was thus reinterpreted as historical difference, hierarchized as progressive stages of culture and society, from an initial phase of hunting and gathering to the present phase of European commerce.14 Of course, many historians, troubled by the long-standing prosperity of China, found it difficult to assign superiority to Europe (Markley, Far East 72–79). At any rate, contrary to the developmental model, utopian fantasies often idealized the past. Some writers championed what we now call primitivism, as Denis Diderot would in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772). In the eyes of the English, Tahiti, like Britain, “appeared to have a natural disposition to liberty which excessive outside contact might vitiate” (Cheek 28). Nevertheless, Diderot idealizes Tahiti on a lower order of magnitude. The actual terrestrial paradise, so important to Columbus, became part of a past that was truly unrecoverable, useful only for metaphorical purposes (Withers, “Geography, Enlightenment” 67–92).
Geographic disenchantment is perhaps best visible—literally—in the period’s maps and globes. In 1662, Johannes Blaeu surpassed Ortelius with his Atlas Maior, a twelve-volume compendium with thousands of pages of text and hundreds of maps. According to Brotton, “Blaeu represented a new type of geographer who eschewed speculation in pursuit of the construction of a globally comprehensive geography” (183). The Dutch had become Europe’s preeminent cartographers, known especially for their “waggoners,” but at the Académie Royal des Sciences, Giovanni Domenico Cassini took this ideal further, carefully fixing coordinates of latitude and longitude for a long list of locations, more exactly measuring and gridding the earth by astronomical calculations (Godlewska 66–85). This geodesic undertaking involved correspondents all over the world, and the resulting data made their way into the breakthrough maps of Guillaume Delisle, who helped start what is widely considered “a cartographic revolution” (Pedley 39). In England, Edmond Halley helped pioneer the “thematic map,” which isolated and displayed a distinct type of information, such as particulars regarding tides or soil (Thrower, “Edmond Halley”). Herman Moll, a Dutch immigrant to London, was among the best-known cartographers in England, engraving maps used in Dampier’s New Voyage and inspiring the geographic fictions of Defoe and Swift. In his System of Geography (1701) and its updated version, The Compleat Geographer (1709), Moll puffs up the achievements of modern navigators and asserts that their accounts, culled together, opened the way for global commercial traffic (Neill 90–104). He gained an expanding audience for his expansive vision of the world. According to Mary Sponberg Pedley, “The printed map became the most accessible form of geographic information for the largest number of people throughout Western Europe” (1). Maps, of course, reduced the earth to a two-dimensional plane; globes could put it in the palm of one’s hand. Joseph Moxon, the London mathematician and hydrographer, conducted a brisk trade in wares that included what were probably England’s first pocket globes, measuring a mere three inches in diameter and encased by a shell representing the celestial hemispheres (Wallis). Such objects helped shrink the world imaginatively, even though the true size and shape of the earth still remained uncertain (Godlewska 49–50).
Nonetheless, whatever the claims to uniformity and universality, the practices and accomplishments of Enlightenment geography remained uneven and partial. David Livingstone has shown that geography has a history (Geographical Tradition). Recent work has shown that it also has a geography. As Livingstone, Withers, Miles Ogborn, and others have demonstrated, geographic knowledge—indeed, all knowledge—is geographically situated, and different places produce, transmit, receive, synthesize, and contest a variety of geographies.15 Numerous qualifications are in order. Jonathan Lamb and Anna Neill argue that travel reports sometimes aroused intense skepticism (Lamb, “Eye-Witnessing” 201–12; Neill 99–104). Flipping the problem, John Locke, a great champion of travel writing (Carey, “Travel, Geography”), was very reasonably wary of ignorant disbelief in his parable of the Siamese king who doubts that water freezes in Holland simply because he has not witnessed it personally (Locke, Human Understanding 654–57). Even when written in good faith, travel accounts and natural historical descriptions were suffused with wonder and fetishistic detail (Lamb, “Minute Particulars”; Daston, “Language”). Curiosity—and a robust literary marketplace—outpaced real knowledge. New surveys, even new copperplates for maps, were often prohibitively expensive, so outdated information continued to be copied and resold. Indeed, the myriad contingencies of the market affected the composition of maps at least as much as current knowledge and new discoveries (Pedley 19–72). Geography consisted, as well, of practice- and script-based information that never emerged to the stratum of print, information that was jealously guarded by the East India Company, for example (Ogborn, Indian Ink). Understandings of global space, we must remember, were defined by routes and sea lanes connecting one place to another, rather than panoramic surveys of everything in between (Fernández-Armesto 245–86). Huge portions of the world—the interior of Africa, immense swaths of the Pacific—remained unknown to Europeans, untrodden by even the most intrepid voyagers. Belief persisted in the great southern continent, Terra Austrailis Incognita, in numerous other legends of the South Seas, and in a Northwest Passage to Asia (Spate; G. Williams, Great South Sea; G. Williams, Voyages of Delusion). At the time, Europeans still awaited John Harrison’s reliable device for calculating longitude at sea (Howse; Sorrenson). Even the geography of England was uncertain: John Ogilby’s popular Britannia (1675) was really a road atlas, and more exact surveying, and funding for it, came later. We cannot assume that advances in geographic knowledge, or its diffusion, debunked utopia or pushed it off the earth. Certainly, in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, geographic disenchantment required more than existing books, maps, and globes.
Of course, however incomplete, the creation of knowledge fueled and was fueled by expansionist activities that did in fact link faraway places in political and commercial associations. Enlightenment geography was practiced for the sake of profit and power, not disinterested inquiry. A better explanation of this process, perhaps, is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s notion of disenchantment, which centers on domination (3–42). Whatever the connection between knowledge and power, travel writers tried to pull them together, and mapmakers did the same, straining to turn their representations into tools of mastery.16 Dampier, Wafer, and Rogers proclaimed an ardent hope that their descriptions would do more than satisfy curiosity, that they would be useful to a nation looking at commercial and colonial opportunities abroad. For Moll and so many others, “the criteria for what constitutes true and valuable knowledge about places and peoples are almost exclusively commercial” (Neill 93). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, England came into its own as an emerging imperial power, with sturdier colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America and in the Caribbean; English traders secured commercial forts in India and started dominating the transatlantic slave trade (R. Johnson; Sheridan; P. Marshall; D. Richardson). The South Sea Bubble was built on irrational speculation, but it was financial, not literary, speculation: rooted in England, merely extractive and acquisitive (G. Williams, Great South Sea 161–213). Similarly, Locke had based his theory of property and colonialism on expectations of unlimited land and inexhaustible resources in America (Markley, “‘Land Enough’”). The new science would prove nature more limited, especially in island settings, and as Clarence Glacken once wrote, “In the eighteenth century another idea, distinct from older orthodox theories of environmental influence, commanded attention: the earth itself sets limits to population growth and to human well-being and hence to human aspirations and achievement” (623).17 At any rate, imperial fantasies are different to begin with: for Davis, the defining feature of utopian writing is its refusal of dreams of unlimited abundance. Adventurers saw at the horizon riches to lay hold of, not better societies to escape to. They spurred the period’s commercial integration and imperial expansion, or what we think of as the activities of early globalization. Quite obviously, the exchanges resulting from these phenomena ran counter to fully separate utopian enclaves.
Hypothetically, though, imperialism was not incompatible with utopianism. King Utopus, after all, was a conqueror first and a benevolent monarch second; Utopia was made before it was discovered. Generally, utopia and ideology are mutually implicative, despite efforts to pry them apart (Mannheim); utopia, rather, is “an ideological critique of ideology” (Marin, Utopics 195). It is rich with imperial—and anti-imperial—resonance (Sargent). Enlightenment writers did not endorse expansionism unanimously; they also questioned and criticized it (Hawes, British Eighteenth Century; Ahmed). Regardless, for some, the real malleability of foreign territory must have made utopian space seem possible, achievable. Britain’s push into the New World and beyond established greater connectivity, but it was still possible to imagine colonial enclaves—or even create them, as Vasco de Quiroga had done in New Spain, imitating More’s model (Holstun 5–9). There was also George Berkeley’s popular Bermuda project, which “captured the imagination of much of English society, becoming for a time synonymous with a romantic retreat from the ills of the world” (Fabricant, “George Berkeley” 267). Throughout the period, British colonists continued to found separatist communities among the North American colonies (Holloway), all of which were influenced in one way or another by the legacy of utopian thought.
The preponderance of recent scholarship, however, has sought to remind us of the tentativeness and fragility of the early British Empire. Historians have reassessed Europe’s global position, portraying the West as peripheral rather than central to the early modern world economy.18 As Markley points out, “If narratives of New World colonization reinforced Eurocentric beliefs in national greatness, universal monarchy, and Christian triumphalism, the experience of Europeans in China, Japan, and (before 1716) Moghul India radically challenged all of these ideological constructions” (Far East 3). In practice, New World colonialism raised doubts of its own, and what was once Edenic came to seem quite the opposite (Jones 1–70). Lamb, meanwhile, has revised the old story of heroic discoverers in the Pacific: “Although the Europeans started out with great advantages—their guns and their immunity to diseases fatal to natives—they were engaged as exigently as the Polynesians in the struggle to preserve the self” (Preserving the Self 5). These voyagers, for Lamb, described new lands and peoples from situations of confusion and crisis, often incapable of self-preservation, let alone commerce and conquest. Linda Colley, meanwhile, has emphasized “the very large numbers of real-life Crusoes and Gullivers” (Captives 11).19 The edge of empire was a setting for not just utopia but also the captivity narrative, utopia’s generic opposite, a form that portrayed foreign spaces as painful and confining, not pleasurable and liberating. At the very least, overseas ventures entailed negotiations, relative diminishments of authority. In the days of More and Bacon, England had no real empire to speak of; literature could compensate for overseas powerlessness. Later utopian writing runs aground of harder realities.
England’s identity as an island, a nation protected by the seas, was itself a construct, so much so that one historian has reversed the line by James Thomson and argued that the waves ruled Britannia (J. Scott). The country was pulled outward and enmeshed with the larger world in and beyond Europe, while faraway peoples and goods, not to mention influences, flowed homeward, provoking both delight and disgust. English merchants and European cosmopolitans, as well as diverse others, from monarchs down to slaves, acted and interacted on a shared global stage—albeit shared unequally (Hancock; Jacob; Ogborn, Global Lives). The whole field of Atlantic studies is predicated on circumoceanic interconnections in which England, beginning in the seventeenth century, played a major role (Bailyn). There were “strangers within the realm,” outsiders inside the expanding imperial margins: from Scotland and Ireland, from Holland and Germany, and from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean (Bailyn and Morgan). Returning from his travels, Dampier brought with him his “Painted Prince,” Jeoly, a native of the Spice Islands, bought as a slave and presented in London as a polite entertainment (Barnes). African servants adorned the outer corners of the paintings of William Hogarth, suggesting to viewers the moral perils of foreign luxuries (Molineux 178–218). At the top of the list was sugar, harvested on the backs of slaves in the Caribbean (R. Blackburn 401–56). Merchants from all over the world bustled about the Royal Exchange, buying and selling—though not without prompting xenophobia and anti-Semitism (Jacob 69–74). New merchandise from China incited acquisitiveness and anxiety, identification and rejection (Porter, Chinese Taste; Jenkins), and ideas and texts from the Islamic world inspired religious conversion and helped propel political radicalism (Matar; Garcia). Utopian fantasies themselves were often transcultural, building off reports about the Middle and Far East (Nussbaum, Torrid Zones 135–66; Porter, Chinese Taste 57–77; Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism 217–30). What I am describing, though, is the doomed fate of a more traditional kind of utopia, one that depended on the lone voyager finding escape and sanctuary and returning to tell of it. The permeability of national borders and the traversability of oceanic and continental distances gradually undermined such fantasies.
The known world came to look merely “heterotopic,” variegated not by imaginative leaps but by actual material and cultural incongruities (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”). Legal and geographic boundaries remained formidable, and undoubtedly there persisted unreached and unreachable lands, spaces that remained impervious, impenetrable, recalcitrant. We cannot assume that European empires and dawning globalization suddenly flattened or homogenized the world.20 As Lauren Benton puts it, “Empires did not cover space evenly but composed a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings. Even in the most paradigmatic cases, an empire’s spaces were politically fragmented; legally differentiated; and encased in irregular, porous, and sometimes undefined borders” (2). European empires, not least the British, failed to efface difference and opposition even within putative domains of control. At the same time, these were struggles between actual peoples, producing actual history. Transcendent disengagement became much harder to map out.
At home, utopia was not so much explained away as downgraded and suppressed, viewed as subversive to social stability. Some deemed utopia impossible. Others saw it as too possible, remembering the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. To them, it smacked of excessive and dangerous enthusiasm, “which was connected with all that was revolutionary about the English Revolution as well as with much that was ‘lunatic’ about it” (Appelbaum, Literature and Utopian Politics 104). Reasonable writers tended to mock utopian enthusiasm.
Clearly, novelistic disenchantment is anticipated in earlier writing, in both utopian literature and various geographic discourses, but still this was an attitude more than a fact. It was a constructed and contingent perspective built upon the testimony of numerous others. Moll understood as much when defending his reliance on “the most Credible Travellers and Historians, and most Judicious Geographers,” admitting that “no one Man can possibly view the whole Earth in a Life-time” (Moll, Compleat Geographer B1). Even if one’s sources were credible, positive discoveries and skeptical conjectures alone could not fully or conclusively negate utopian geographies. Ironically enough, that required fiction, in particular the early novel, which took readers imaginatively, but often realistically, beyond the known world and brought them back with chastened expectations. If utopian geography was always hard to believe in, it ends here even less credible, though not absolutely incredible. It had yet to be discredited on the basis of empirical reconnaissance. Why, then, did novelists discredit it? This is the question I take up in the book’s remaining chapters.