Miles Ogborn

Queen Mary, University of London | QMUL · School of Geography

Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, “Britain and the world.” This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of approaches, shares a common assumption that Britain's interactions with the world beyond its shores enable us to better...

Enlightenment ideas of the the Great Map of Mankind established relationships between historical and geographical distance which provided the problematic for eighteenth-century natural and civil histories. This raised issues of evidence for writing such histories that were particularly acute in the Caribbean, where natural history was - via the mov...

Sometime in the 1760s, a Constantinople-born, French-educated Muslim arrived at the port of Balassor in north-east India. Known variously as Mustapha or Monsieur Raymond, he had, he later wrote, with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar, and by conversing with the ship's captain en route from Bombay, learned enough of English... as I might delig...

The geography of the book is as old as the history of the book, though far less thoroughly explored. Yet research has increasingly pointed to the spatial dimensions of book history, to the transformation of texts as they are made and moved from place to place, from authors to readers and within different communities and cultures of reception. Wides...

What is the power of a spoken agreement, a printed declaration or a private letter? Early modern empires worked through historical geographies of oral and written communication that were rooted in particular localised spaces of production, consumption and distribution and also extended out across networks which spanned large spaces. These forms of...

In the 1997 film The Postman, Kevin Costner plays the part of a drifter with a mule who wanders the post-apocalyptic landscape of north-west America in the year 2013 enacting selections from Shakespeare in return for food and shelter. He is shanghaied into the army of one of the warlords who terrorize the scattered villages that have been thrown ba...

Compared with the attention paid to written texts, geographers and others have neglected the spoken word in its many forms, particularly in investigations of the power relations of colonialism and imperialism. This paper argues that considering orality as a series of embodied, situated enunciations, declarations and conversations can provide a basi...

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale i...

Miles Ogborn discusses how historical geography's traditions make it attentive, in various ways, to the materiality of the world and its material remaking with tools, techniques and technologies of various sorts. Miles says that his book 'Indian Ink' aimed to bring together two areas of work that seemed to have much in common, at least from the per...

World WritingWriting WorldsAcknowledgmentsReferences and further reading

Brand new chapter on the Postmodernisation of Everyday Life

Abstract It is argued that a consideration of the relationship between ‘discipline’(discourses and practices of normalisation) and ‘law’(discourses of abstract, universal rights and duties and their application in concrete situations) is necessary to an understanding of nineteenth century state formation. A discussion of this relationship in relati...

This paper offers a prospectus for a version of historical geography that puts the seas and oceans at the centre of its concerns. This is pursued in three ways. First, via a discussion of the epistemological and historiographic perspectives that might be taken on geographies of the sea, which argues that the view from the ocean can develop geograph...

This paper examines the uses of writing in early modern global trade in order to argue for the constitutive role of inscription practices in the making of the social and spatial relations of mercantile capitalism. At the heart of this is a detailed study of the reform of the accounting and bookkeeping practices of the English East India Company at...

This paper contributes to the understanding of geography and geographical knowledge in 18th-century Britain by exploring its affiliations with the craft of ‘penmanship’. The connections between geography and writing are demonstrated by exploring the words and images used by the engraver George Bickham in a series of works which were both geographic...

Most discussions of the relationships between ‘the East’, ‘the West’ and writing have, following Edward Said, involved interpreting the representations of people and places within travel writing, novels and other literary forms. This paper argues that this restricted engagement with practices of reading and writing limits the ways in which the rela...

This paper considers the historical geography of a key moment of state formation: the late seventeenth-century development of the administration of excise taxation—taxes on the producers of commodities, especially beer—which would generate the revenue necessary to enable Britain to become an imperial power in the eighteenth century. This political...

This article interprets the connections and tensions between luxuriousconsumption, masculinity and the visual in the 1770s. It does so byproviding a reading of a fracas in London's Vauxhall Gardens involving aparson, an actress and three fashionable men - subsequently identifiedas 'Macaronis' who had stared at her and fought with him. The interpret...

Historical geography has been 'at large' this year - or, at least, some of its themes have been. The year 1995 saw the publication of Harvard historian Simon Schama's Landscape and memory. This is a book directed at a much wider market than academic historians. Glossy, lavishly illustrated and accompanied by a television series it sought to put que...

This paper explores the impact of ideas and programmes of separate confinement on the prison system of nineteenth-century England and Wales. It traces the failure of regimes enforcing 'solitude' to become national policy in the eighteenth century and, following an analysis of the geographies of infrastructural provision for separate confinement in...

This paper questions those interpretations of 19th century police reform which seek to explain its incidence and intensity through the lens of economic relations. Through a critical reading of the work of Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann it replaces the concern with the quantitative features of the post-1835 provincial police forces with a sustaine...

Questions of marginalization and the representations of 'otherness' are increasingly important within geography. The author explores what such representations can tell us about the 'centre' rather than the 'margins'. He does so by employing the tools of deconstruction to read a 19th century 'historical geography' of prostitution. This text, written...

This paper discusses the teaching of qualitative historical geography through the consideration of a course taught at the University of Salford entitled ‘Sources, Problems and Interpretation in Historical Geography’. The development of one part of the course, a ‘module’ on Victorian Britain using discussion group activity to interpret various sourc...

This paper challenges the orthodox dualistic analysis of central-local relations presented in histories of nineteenth century social policy. It argues that local power does not rest within conceptions of community, or in the ideology of local possessive pluralism characteristic of ratepayers' democracies, but in the administrative structures of the...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge, 1990.