Linking Words and Worlds of Trade: Commodities and the Cultural Geographies of Maritime Spaces

by Deryck W. Holdsworth and Henry J. Rademacher

The Pennsylvania State University

Department of Geography

The authors are two historical geographers interested in the patterns of "power in place"; their various research projects focus on processes and morphologies related to the landscapes and control points of capital flows.  Deryck Holdsworth's current research explores the historical geographies of the proto-office district of mercantile cities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; Henry Rademacher is writing a doctoral dissertation on the relationships between bankers, investors, the state, and railroad companies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. An important part of Holdsworth's proto-office district project is the linking of the specific world of merchants' counting-houses with their wider regional and global commodity chains.  He has been interested in a set of commercial dictionaries, found in the counting-house library, which assessed the relative quality of specific products that came from distinct places or regions. One such dictionary was William Anderson's The London Commercial Dictionary and Sea-port Gazetteer, (1819, revised 1826). This was 888 pages in length and contained over 2,900 entries, some on places, others on products and, quite often, on the processes of trade (weights, currencies, regulations, import and export restrictions, etc.).  Preliminary results of the authors' investigations were presented at the Sea-Changes conference in Greifswald (Wieck) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Deutschland, during the summer of 2000.  This website includes short explanatory notes and links to images which augment/supplement footnotes of the chapter cited in the paragraphs that follow.

Working with fellow geographer Henry J. Rademacher, information from Anderson has been entered into a relational database.  With the help of Daniel Haug, then a staff member of the GeoVISTA Center in the Geography Department at Penn State, exploratory mappings of that data teased out some of the underlying regional and global patterns of trade, and the role of certain commodity vents in organizing that trade. A report on preliminary findings was given at a conference, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, in Griefswald, Germany in the summer of 2000; the revised paper, “Linking Words and Worlds of Trade: Commodities and the Cultural Geographies of Maritime Spaces,” by Deryck W. Holdsworth and Henry J. Rademacher, will be a chapter in The Sea as a Cultural Contact Zone: Spaces, Travelers, Representations, edited by Gesa Mackenthun, Bernhard Klein, and Andreas Blauert, Konstanz: UVK-Verlag (forthcoming in German, English later).  Some of the images on this page are referenced in the footnotes for that chapter. 

The following brief notes explain decisions behind some of the plotting of place data.
 

• For our maps, circles are used for specific places and a distorted hexagon is used for loosely defined regions. Places are shown as proportional circles, scaled according to the number of lines of text devoted to that dictionary place entry; the circles are filled with increasing color saturation from white to deep red.

• Magnetic north is different now than it was almost two hundred years ago, and, therefore, the longitude data from 1819 meant that modern ARC/INFO plots put many places consistently east of where they “are”!  We corrected these by consulting modern gazetteers. 

• Plotting regions rather than ports or towns meant we had to decide on some single location for that symbol. Coordinates for different regions were entered, often in the center of a country or continent, though we realize that this—or any other arbitrary position—potentially distorts maritime interactions as depicted by our lines.  Hence the spatial identifier for Africa is in the middle of the desert or equatorial jungle, and Russia is sometimes summarized through a place far to the east of the Urals. 

• In our representations of places, we have also added a further 116 places and regions that, although not specific alphabetical entries in Anderson, are mentioned in the textual descriptions, and those locations are noted by an “x.” 

• Information concerning a particular node, or attributes of a line linking two nodes, can be retrieved by placing the cursor on that point or line; clicking the cursor then brings up an inset box that reveals embedded data. Such capacity is not available in these static web postings.