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35 - Global Pillage: Science, Commerce, and Empire

from Part V - Ramifications and Impacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Larry Stewart
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
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Summary

A map is a representation on paper – a picture – you understand picture? – a paper picture – showing, representing the country – yes? – showing your country in miniature – a scaled drawing on paper of – of – of –

Brian Friel, Translations

At the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1763, British blue-water policy bore some strange fruit in exchanging the sugar island of Gaudeloupe for “quelques arpents de neige” in the Canadian wilderness – leading to much consternation and bitterness between the elder Pitt and the pliant Scotsman, Lord Bute. This was surely the moment when an expansive British Empire was born and, in response, a new wave of French adventures. Thus, we find the self-effacing Louis de Bougainville soon to make his celebrated four-year circumnavigation (1766–9), a superb account of which was swiftly published – although Bougainville lamented, “Ce n’est ni dans les forêts du Canada, ni sur le sein des mers, que l’on se forme á l’art d’écrire.” Nonetheless, unlike the fashionable experience of European naturalists and systematizers who constrained “dans les ombres de leur cabinet … soumettent impérieusement la nature á leurs imaginations,” here was a self-described “voyageur & marin; c’est á dire, un menteur, & un imbécille.” Bougainville’s brilliant tale is as much a romance of rocky shoals, high seas, men overboard, and inevitable scurvy as much as laying-to in sheltered Pacific coves and shallow bays, behind coral shoals and the welcoming arms of Tahitians.

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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 825 - 844
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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