A Late Enlightenment Enterprise: The British East India Company’s Survey of the Paracels in 1808

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the survey of the Paracels organized by the British East India Company (EIC) in 1808 in the context of the late Enlightenment. It documents the preparatory work for and execution of the survey to show that it overturned the erroneous representations of the Paracels on maps and charts from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Using new archival material, including ship’s journals, memoirs, and private letters, this paper examines details of this survey, including patronage networks and the role played by institutions to argue that the late Enlightenment was a period of transformation in the epistemology and methodology of geography.

KEYWORDS:

• Paracel Islands
• Enlightenment
• history of cartography
• British East India Company (EIC)
• Alexander Dalrymple
• Philip Maughan

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were read at several conferences, including the 26th International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC) at Antwerp, 12th–17th July 2015. I thank the Swire Educational Trust for awarding me the Swire–Cathay Pacific Visiting Fellowship, hosted at the University of Oxford 2016–2017. I would also like to thank the editors of this Special Issue, Elizabeth Baigent and Nick Millea, for their insightful comments on later drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributor

Yannan Ding (PhD in Geography, KU Leuven, 2012) is Associate Professor of Historical Geography, Fudan University. He was a Swire–Cathay Pacific Visiting Fellow (2016–2017) at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and is the first co-editor of China: A Historical Geography of the Urban (Palgrave, 2017).