Discourses of Distance: Conceptions of Geographic and Cultural Space in the British Atlantic, 1607-1776

Abstract

This study examines travelers’ perceptions of distance as they moved about the British Atlantic World in the period from the founding of the first English settlement in North America at Jamestown in 1607 to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Distance here is understood to encompass the familiar expressions (physical space, time between locations) and alternate conceptions, including the sense of distance created by differing cultural markers and levels of economic development. Perceptions of distance arising from attributional factors illuminate how observers, using England broadly and London specifically as cultural benchmarks, understood the place of the various components of the First British Empire and an emerging trans-Atlantic imperial British national identity. Travelers’ experiences confirm the existence of internal peripheries within the Atlantic Archipelago, conforming to the so-called “Celtic fringe” that includes the Scottish Highlands, Ireland, Welsh uplands, and Cornwall. Across the Atlantic, observers understood attributional distance, perceptible from the late seventeenth century, between Britain’s North American colonies and the metropole made retention of these colonies in the imperial framework increasingly challenging. Most surprisingly, I argue that in the late eighteenth century, travelers’ perceived the Caribbean colonies, long denigrated in the historiography as degenerate and displaying no signs of British social norms, as the most physically proximate to Britain due to the Caribbean colonists’ ability to replicate British norms and customs.