Spaces of Global Knowledge

’If there is one thing that this remarkable collection makes crystal clear, it’s that movement is fundamental to making knowledge. Whether it’s about ideas or images, specimens or species, texts or things, the generation of knowledge at any one site requires the circulation of items among many sites. This set of essays thus wonderfully demonstrates just how that troubled article, global knowledge, was actually made through encounters in particular places, collections of particular items, and the circulation of particular texts. Spaces of Global Knowledge takes us on a journey that shows, for once and for all, that if there ever was such a thing as an ivory tower or a brain in a vat it only existed as a momentary halt in a dynamic global communication network. An altogether exhilarating excursion.’

David N. Livingstone, Queen’s University, UK

’What did it mean to make global knowledge during the long nineteenth century’s age of empire, industrialism, exploration and exhibition? At the cutting edge of historical geography’s encounter with histories of knowledge, the essays in this collection examine the spatial practices, power relations and communicative forms involved in making, circulating, displaying and debating a dizzying range of ways of knowing the nineteenth-century globe from natural history to demography, ocean science and medicine. Together they confirm not a singular global history of knowledge but the fruitful multiplicity of its historical geographies.’

Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary University of London, UK

'The variety of methodologies expertly employed is refreshing and makes the collection a useful primer for students but also an instructive resource for experts in any of the fields included. It is a self-aware collection determined to provoke questions and un-dermine assumptions about how knowledge is formed across boundaries, a goal it achieves admirably.'

Katherine Parker Hakluyt Society, UK, Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017)

'Spaces of Global Knowledge is the latest instalment in the Studies in Historical Geography Routledge series, edited by Robert Mayhew. This volume is an ambitious collection of essays, which neatly weaves together a number of seemingly disparate case studies to create something that both illustrates and challenges what it means to think geographically about how global knowledge was made during the long nineteenth century.'

Matthew Goodman, University of Glasgow, British Journal for the History of Science

'This edited collection embraces and seeks to interrogate the ubiquitous yet vague terms of ‘global’ and ‘knowledge’. The authors offer a variety of methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding where, how, and why global knowledge was created in the long nineteenth century. Together, the essays show-case the elasticity of the term ‘global’ in critical historical analysis while also cautioning scholars against its overuse or its conflation with related terms such as ‘empire’.'

Katherine Parker Hakluyt Society, UK, Journal of Historical Geography