Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook's Voyages Changed the World

Johnathan H. Pope is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at
McMaster University.

In Longitude and Empire, Brian W. Richardson demonstrates without
hyperbole how Cook’s voyages changed the world. His argument is based
primarily on the way Cook used a mathematical and geometrical approach
to exploration in order to transform a subjective view of the world into
a systematic view that replaced speculation and conjecture with tables,
charts, and coordinates.

This systemization moved from the general to the specific, and
Richardson focuses on Cook’s discussion of Pacific islands in
particular. Cook’s use of longitude allowed for the creation of a
reliable map, and the accurately rendered islands of the Pacific became
“containers” that would be filled up with the details of people and
things. This affected, for example, the way in which people thought
about borders and nations by establishing the presence of fixed
perimeters that designated the tangible separation between identifiable
national groups. As the organizers of the knowledge collected, Europe
(and particularly Britain) would establish the parameters of the
collection, dictating how and where everything fit. After Cook,
explorers simply refined or filled in the gaps left by Cook, but they
did not establish a new paradigm in the way that he did.

Although Richardson’s goal of demonstrating how Cook changed the
world seems like an impossibility, his argument is convincing and lucid.
However, his dialogue with other writers could be expanded. He engages
with fellow critic Paul Carter regularly, but he often refrains from
engaging with other Cook scholars. Similarly, Richardson reads Cook in
relation to various philosophers and theorists such as Locke, Hobbes,
Kant, and Foucault, but these intersections are occasionally cursory and
lack the attention he pays to Cook.

Nevertheless, Richardson’s accessible writing carries the reader
along. His answer to the question of whether Cook changed the world
covers enough ground that even a skeptical reader will find something to
agree with.