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.

The thesis draws upon an ethnographic and qualitative study of two related sites in the world of commercial bookselling. It provides a detailed account of the role of the book in the everyday lives of a group of readers and of the organisational practices and experience of work within a UK bookselling chain. This empirical account is entwined with a theoretical argument founded in non-representational theories of practice and subjectivity. This leads to a stance critical of dualistic conceptions of society and space and an attempt to describe and understand these sites as the outcome of material, human and discursive relations rather than as essentialised entities. The thesis explores the implications of this conceptualisation of these sites in terms of recent debates concerning commodity chains, the role of the object and materiality in constituting society and space and notions of subjectivity and identity and draws conclusions concerning the spatiality of these concepts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

First issued as Inaug.-Diss.--Zürich.

Thèse--Paris, 1913. / Bibliographical references included in "Préface."

Thesis--Frankfurt am Main. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 227-236.

First part issued as thesis, Utrecht.

Thesis--Columbia University. / "150 copies printed. No. 35." Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. [125]-131) "Checklist of works written, compiled, edited, published, or reprinted by Louis Alexis Hocquet de Caritat": p.[132]-139.

Thèse--Paris, 1913. / Bibliographical references included in "Préface."

Master's paper (M.S. in L.S.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-41) and abstract.