Writing travels

Power, knowledge and ritual on the English East India Company’s early voyages

Bibliographic Data

ID8964290
AuthorsMiles Ogborn (0000-0002-0322-3416, Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume27
Issue2
Pages155-171
Publication date2002-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1475-5661.00047
OpenAlexW2064438408
LanguageEN
Citations received51
References cited18

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 relationships between people involved in the global geographies constructed since the fifteenth century can be understood. Through presenting a detailed discussion of the role of royal letters within the voyages of the English East India Company in the early seventeenth century, it argues that an analysis of ‘how writing travels’ which concentrates on the production, carriage and use of texts as material objects can foreground the active and collective making of global geographies as a contested enterprise involving multiple agents in a variety of sites. This paper presents writing as a global cultural practice and traces its place in the making of an early modern trading network

Art · Fifteenth · Linguistics · Literature · Power (physics · Reading (process · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Classics · Computer Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature

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