Calculating Similitude and Difference: John Seller and the 'Placing' of English Subjects in the Global Community of Nations

Steinberg, Philip E.

Abstract

This article examines uses of calculation in the works of John Seller, a seventeenth-century publisher of sea atlases, navigation manuals and popular geography texts. It is argued that Seller led his readers to calculate overseas places as distant but accessible and to calculate overseas peoples as different but similar. Foreign places thus were constructed as knowable, opening up a world wherein the English could engage in commerce and, in some instances, territorial domination. By inviting his readers to constitute projections of similitude and difference across time and space, Seller enabled them to use calculation to construct themselves as English subjects who knew their ‘place’, within the English nation and within the global community of nations.

Citation

Steinberg, P. E. (2006). Calculating Similitude and Difference: John Seller and the 'Placing' of English Subjects in the Global Community of Nations. Social and Cultural Geography, 7(5), 687-707. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600971242

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2006
• Deposit Date: Sep 6, 2013
• Journal: Social and Cultural Geography
• Print ISSN: 1464-9365
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1197
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 687-707
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600971242
• Keywords: calculation, navigation, John Seller, England, cartography