Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Royal geographical society of London'

This thesis is about the mobilities of geographical knowledge in the material form of lantern-slides and the forces exerted on these by technological and human factors. Owing to its concern with matter, human- and non-human, and its circulation, the thesis addresses the physics of geographical knowledge. The chapters below investigate the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) ongoing tradition of telling stories of science and exploration through words, objects and pictures in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and as geography professionalized and geographical science developed. These processes occurred within the context of a plethora of technological innovations, including the combination of the older medium of the magic lantern and photographic lantern-slides, integral to a wide range of entertainment, scientific and educational performances across Britain. In 1886 the RGS began to engage with the magic lantern. Via this technology and the interactive lecture performances in which it featured, I argue that the Society embraced the medium of photography, thereby engendering transformations in methods of knowledge making and to the RGS collections. I study how these transformations influenced the discipline of Geography as it was re-established at the University of Oxford in 1887. I demonstrate the evolution of the RGS’s Evening, Technical and Young Persons’ lectures, their contingent lantern-slide practices and, consequently, how these moulded, and were moulded by, the RGS Fellowship between c. 1885 and 1924. The chapters below explore how these innovations in visual technologies and practices arose, how they circulated knowledge and their effect on geographies of geographical knowledge making. By harnessing the lantern the RGS attracted an expanding and diversifying audience demographic. The thesis demonstrates the interactive nature of RGS lantern-slide lectures and audiences' important role in shaping the Society’s practices and geographical knowledge. The chapters below argue that it was via the use of the lantern that geography was disseminated to new places. The thesis therefore brings additional perspectives and dimensions to understandings of the circulation of geographical knowledge.

Women’s expeditionary work, in common with women’s geographical work more broadly, has been comparatively understudied within the history of geographical thought and practice, and within the wider discipline, until relatively recently (Domosh 1991a, 1991b; Rose 1993; Maddrell 2009a). This thesis, completed for a Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of the West of England, and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), charts this terra incognita, and presents a reconstructed historical geography of women’s participation in RGS-supported expeditions between 1913 and 1970, taking as its start date the permanent admission of women to the Fellowship of the RGS. Building on earlier substantive feminist research into women’s historic geographical and expeditionary work (Maddrell, 2009a), it presents a systematic survey of all applications for RGS support during this period, drawing on a range of sources from across the RGS archives and collections. Prior to this doctoral study, this material had not been investigated for this purpose or in great depth, nor was there a complete record of the RGS’s support of expeditionary work during this period: this thesis presents a new and original database which can be used to research these questions. Drawing on these original findings, and on the extensive literatures around feminist historical geography, feminist epistemologies, the historiography of geographical thought and practice, as well as the recent literature on mobilities, this thesis investigates how women negotiated the networks in, around, and beyond the RGS to gain support for their expeditionary work. In particular, it highlights the importance of women-focused networks and familial-social networks for gaining this support. It also uses their participation in and embodied experiences of RGS-supported expeditions, including their expeditionary (im)mobilities and expeditionary relationships, to complicate existing understandings of expeditions as a male-dominated space, form, and practice of geographical knowledge production, thereby investigating the relationships between gender, subjectivity, and expeditionary knowledge production. Finally, it considers the dissemination and reception of their expeditionary knowledges within the spaces of the RGS.

This thesis is concerned with the role and status of singular experiences in the making and diffusion of natural knowledge at the Royal Society of London between 1695 and 1752. It is primarily focused on reports of extraordinary phenomena concerning the generation of living beings that were presented at the meetings of the Royal Society or published in the Philosophical Transactions. First, I discuss their significance in terms of their place in the natural historical agenda at the Society and of their authorship. Next, the reporting and displaying of singular experiences is considered in the context of the culture of curiosity at the Society. Some of the multiple and interconnected roles of these practices in the promotion of inquiry, instruction, polite discourse and entertainment of the Fellows are discussed. The various strategies used in the authentication of observations of extraordinary phenomena are then considered. Particular attention is paid to the roles assigned to the competence and status of the reporter and witnesses in the assessment of testimony. Next, the Fellows interest in extraordinary phenomena, as portrayed in some literary satires of the period, is discussed as part of a more general assault on the language, activities, and credibility of the members of the Royal Society. Then, I focus on the medical understanding of monstrosity at the Society, examining the use of monsters in anatomical and physiological inquiry as well as the tension involved in their understanding within a system of natural order. I also discuss human hermaphrodites as the subject of the most radical attempts by members of the Society to integrate the monstrous within the natural and social order. Finally, in the Conclusion, the relationship between the various perspectives presented in the different chapters is addressed, as well as the issue of continuity and change in the experience of the singular at the Royal Society in the eighteenth century.

The thesis presents the first in-depth study of the role of measuring instruments in a leading scientific society concerned with field science. It draws upon a substantial literature in the history of science, geography, and exploration and makes use of actor network theory. The thesis considers the instruments to have been assimilated into an iterative cyclical process. By studying each aspect of the cycle, a comprehensive understanding of the integration of instruments into the working practices of the Society, the process of exploration, and ultimately the British imperialist endeavour, has been achieved. The start date is that of the founding of the Society. The end date approximates to the retirement of the map curator Edward Reeves, when recording practices at the Society changed. The century has coherence as the instruments remained essentially similar. The thesis therefore draws on a range of archival material: the journal articles, the medal awards, and the maps in addition to the paper archives, minute books and instruments themselves. The empirical findings have been enriched by reference to a substantial literature from historians of science, historical geographers and instrument historians. The thesis documents instrumental activity on behalf of the Society from acquisition to disposal or loss, regarding activity on behalf of the Society as 'added resource'. The thesis argues that the ambitions of the Society were slow to be enacted, and that a collection of instruments for lending was not formed until 1850. The preparation of travellers has been discussed as a complementary activity; systematic provision is likewise found to have been slow. Having studied fifty expeditions with respect to instrument mobilisation, from which excerpts are presented, a number of factors are identified which affected success, and the fallibility of instruments is confirmed. The itineraries of over a thousand individual items have been charted and made available in a database which will assist future research. The agencies of the instruments have been considered to be knowledge creation, individual reputation, empire, and social relations. The RGS developed strategies for militating against the fallibility of instruments in the field to provide credible outcomes. The instrumental data was manipulated by a growing body of professionals which served to moderate results. The instruments conferred social and epistemological authority to some groups more than others, but not necessarily in the manner predicted by existing theories. The geographical endeavour could be subsumed into imperialist demands. The instruments reflected and strengthened existing social hierarchies. The conclusions drawn indicate that historians of science and geography need to look at the role of instruments in more detail than extant models of knowledge creation, including ANT, suggest.

My thesis describes the praxis of geographical exploration in the mid-nineteenth century through the activities of members of the Royal Geographical Society of London (RGS). I focus on the First East African Expedition (1856-1859), which was led by Richard F. Burton. Geographical exploration was intended to provide data that would allow geographers in Britain to construct an accurate description of East Africa, with emphasis on the rivers and lakes that may contribute to the waters of the Nile and ethnographic research. Earlier geographies of the East African interior had relied upon a variety of sources: ancient, Arab, Portuguese, and local informants. In order to replace these sources with precise observation, the RGS provided some prescriptive instructions to explorers based upon the techniques of celestial navigation and surveying available for field research in the 1850s. The instructions emphasized careful, daily recording of data, using instruments as much as possible. However, in the field explorers experienced a diminished ability to control the consistency of their observations due to insufficient finances, politics, disease, and climate. Where unable to directly observe, they relied upon local informants for descriptions of the regional geography. These informants had a great impact upon the geographies produced by the expedition. In order to complete a full description of the praxis of geographical exploration it therefore becomes necessary to consider the expedition in its wider context--as a remote sensing tool for a scientific society and as a contingent of foreigners visiting a region for which they have little information and entered only with local permission. I propose that five steps, or contexts, must be considered during the analysis of expeditions: contact, acquisition, appropriation, reporting, meta-analysis. These steps make lucid the epistemic transformations that must take place as explorers gather data in the field. At each stage the identity of the individuals involved are contingent upon their relationship with each other and the information they desire. The relationship between explorers and local informants was especially critical to the establishment of credibility. Even when fully trusted by explorers, the British geographers who analyzed expedition data and generated maps of the region debated the veracity of local informants. Explorers (and by extension, local informants) found that other researchers, through the meta-analysis of expedition reports, appropriated any ownership of the information produced by expeditions.
Master of Science

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Between 1967 and 1969, invited by Fundação Brasil Central, an ad hoc expediton of The Royal Society and The Royal Geographical Society, known as the Mato Grosso Expedition, came to Brazil. The expedition‟s researches were closely related to the Brazilian military regime‟s plans to occupy and develop the so called Brasil Central. The documentation of the Mato Grosso Expedition shows the resumption of post colonial practices and the movement of a so called pure science towards an applied science according to the national developmentist project. The expedition also shows the maintenance of the british prospecting model in untouched territories and their consequences to science
Entre 1967 e 1969, a convite da Fundação Brasil Central, veio ao Brasil a expedição conjunta Royal Society/Royal Geographical Society, conhecida como Expedição Mato Grosso . Os estudos feitos pelo grupo de cientistas ligaram-se estreitamente ao projeto desenvolvimento de ocupação do Centro-Oeste brasileiro pelo governo militar e a documentação sobre a expedição revela a retomada de práticas pós-coloniais e a passagem da ciência pura para uma ciência aplicada nos moldes do desejado para o projeto desenvolvimentista nacional. A análise da Expedição Mato Grosso mostra a manutenção do modelo britânico de prospecção de territórios ainda intocados e suas consequências sobre a ciência

David Livingstone is considered one of the greatest travellers of the 19th century. His travels changed the perception of the African continent and its people in Western countries. Thanks to journeys motivated by founding of mission stations, the spread of God's Word and the suppression of the slave trade carried out in the years 1849-1873, he made a series of important discoveries. During the first surveys in areas of southern and eastern Africa in 1849 and 1856, he discovered Lake Ngami, Victoria Falls, made transcontinental travel across Africa and explored the great Zambezi River. He established a friendship with the tribal chiefs, win them over his sermons and for their expeditions. Earlier during the trips, David Livingstone became well-known at homeland and abroad. After return from Africa in 1856, his popularity spread through book of travels Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. In 1858 he was appointed to head of a governmental expedition to East and Central Africa towards the Zambezi River. The aim of the Expedition was to examine the navigability of the river and surrounding countryside. During this expedition it came out that the river due to natural conditions cannot be used. After many difficulties, the expedition was withdrawn. Though the expedition officially failed,...

The history of exploration is one of the great chapters in the history of mankind, which offers not only strong personal stories of desire and determination but is also related to the Great Powers policy. What stands in center of attention of this thesis is an institution established under the patronage of British king William IV, the aim of which was the promotion of geography and exploration of continents. The Royal Geographical Society has been among others distiguished in the support of expeditions which managed to map the sources of the Nile and contribute to a solution of one of the long term mysteries of the mankind.