Essayists have long reflected on the reasons for travel – its educational, cultural, and spiritual advantages – often (and uncritically) championing travel for its own sake. This chapter identifies the formal aspects of essayistic British travel writing in authorial perspective, thematic content, and publication format, tracking their change over time. It shows that the discursive and stylistic development of the British travel essay was closely bound up with the diversification of the periodical press and the expansion of the empire. Ultimately, it shows that essayists developed a more self-aware and critical attitude towards travelling, informed by a sense of geopolitical, ecological, and ethical responsibility.

Vadim Shneyder provides a financial biography of Chekhov as an upwardly mobile freelance literary laborer against the backdrop of Russia’s economic expansion and transition to a money-driven economy. Shneyder traces the rapid development of industrialization in Russia in the 1890s, driven largely by the expansion of the rail network, and examines how this new environment both appears in Chekhov’s works and shaped the conditions of their production.

Chapter 4 shows that tensions about the applicability of knowledge were never more pronounced than when it came to geographical information. The Gazeta newspaper used its networks of knowledge to attempt to create a new ‘Description of Guatemala’ that would not just counter erroneous claims about the Americas peddled by some European philosophers, but also critically examined existing sources and formats of geographical knowledge. They rejected geography as a universal science that related places across the globe to each other, and instead prioritised information from current statistics as well as local historical archives. Individual reformers also contributed even more practical geographies that reported their own experience of travel. Geography and chorography was considered useful only in so far as it would help to increase trade and prosperity. It followed that securing transport connections through road and harbour works that would allow for an exploitation of natural wealth was the most important application of such knowledge. Reformers attempted to rewrite the geography of the Audiencia’s trade routes, and thought of their projects as integrating specific places more firmly into the geography of the region.

Chapter 2 contrasts these relatively rigid pathways of bureaucratic information-gathering with the novel pathways of communication that the newly founded Economic Society provided. It demonstrates how the Society built up a network of information exchange through correspondence, as well as the publication of a newspaper, the Gazeta de Guatemala. These networks were designed to extend the reach of the Society from urban contexts into rural ones and had an active purpose: members and their associates were exhorted to grow, collect, and harvest economically useful plants. Reports from members over two decades show that, on a small scale at least, this succeeded, leading to an exchange of useful plant material. The varied social position and geographical locations of the newspaper’s subscribers also made its pages an exceptional forum for debate, creating a nascent ‘public sphere’. The networks even extended beyond the Audiencia’s borders, placing Central America in a context of global economic botany and scholarship. One manifestation of the extension of the Society’s practical network was that a member imported a collection of ‘exotic’ plants and seeds from Sumatra and Jamaica, plants which were then grown and harvested in Central America with some success.