ABSTRACT
In the study of the (early) modern history of “the invention of America” (O’Gorman 1958) in the European imaginary, the complex relationship and dependency between history and geography is implied and manifested in multiplicity of discourses that encompass political treatises, historical accounts, legal documents, biographies, and memoirs.1 As John Smith underscored in 1624, history could only be viewed as the dynamic element that brings life to the territory, while space provides “habitation” to what he considered the “vagrant” of history, as it seemed without its stage. In contemporary critical theory, historical space is no longer viewed within the Cartesian and absolute framework that defined most historical discourses of the Enlightenment. More than a scenario of events or the body in need of habitation, space clearly reconnects with history, politics, and culture as we rethink identity, ideas of empire, and society in eighteenth-century intellectual culture. Here I seek to explore the representation and perception of space in historical writing and to see how the study of space or spatiality helps track mobility, flux, and boundary redefinitions found in historical accounts and represented in the cartography of the Americas during the Age of the Enlightenment. When it comes to the understanding of the cultural meanings and the geopolitical processes that shaped this period, regardless of how modern historians view and use space in the twenty-first century, history and geography are interrelated fields that support the understanding of societies. Moreover, we can find how these intellectuals brought forward their cultural milieu imbued with ideas of progress, virtue, and reason to impose Western civilization on the colonized territories. Mapping became emblematic of encyclopedic knowledge as it gave order and coherence to the complexity of the physicality and humanity of the world.2
