Attributing Value to Space

Spatial revaluation in the eighteenth century

Space is never neutral. The attribution of value to space, whether urban, maritime, imperial, domestic or natural, was among the most consequential cultural and political acts available to historical actors. How places acquired worth, how that worth was contested and communicated, and how it was embedded in structures of power, memory, and identity: these are the questions that animate this issue of OGE18. Drawing on case studies from across Europe and the Atlantic world, from nocturnal court spaces to Caribbean ports of print, from reconstructed Hungarian cities to the gardens of menageries and the ecological imaginaries of displaced migrants, the contributors to this volume examine value attribution as a dynamic, relational and politically charged process. Together, these essays demonstrate that the eighteenth century was a period of intensive spatial revaluation in which commercial expansion, imperial ambition, aesthetic innovation, and new cultures of mobility combined to transform how Europeans understood, judged and inhabited as well as constructed the spaces they encountered.