An Assortment of Explorations: Humboldt’s Mexico, Cartographers’ Africa, Lederer’s Virginia, and the Royal Society’s World

Abstract

In this issue of TI, we are pleased to publish research about a variety of exploration endeavors, engaging articles that study exploration in different places from distinct perspectives. In the following pages, readers will learn about travelers in nineteenthcentury Mexico, an explorer in seventeenth-century Virginia, cartographers’ studies of Africa in the Age of Discovery, and the Royal Society of London’s seventeenthcentury world explorations. Notwithstanding this diversity, in one aspect, all the articles are similar: all of them offer fresh perspectives, some by explicitly entering into historiographical debates and others by broaching underexamined topics. Here, I will provide a brief preview of what readers will be treated to in this issue of TI, discussing the articles in their order of appearance. José Enrique Covarrubias’ fascinating article, “Well-founded and not so Wellfounded Expectations: the Civilizing Effect of Commerce and other Economic Topics in Travelogues about Mexico,” examines nineteenth-century Mexico through the eyes of travelers who provide a wide panorama of the country, one that takes us from southern Mexico to the U.S. border and from the Pacific coast of Manzanillo to Veracruz. While Mexico’s famed wealth especially attracted travelers, they also observed the political turmoil and conflict that plagued the fledgling nation, not only foreign invasions but also domestic challenges, including the endeavor of integrating Indigenous peoples into the nation. As Covarrubias explains, a central question of the era pondered by nationals and foreigners alike was why independent Mexico was not living up to its great economic potential. Covarrubias provides an engaging and fresh reading of foreigners’ accounts as they wrestled with this question, placing them within the context of Albert Hirschman’s famous sweet commerce thesis, namely, a strain in European thought that maintained that commercial activity would temper nations’ warlike tendencies and minimize conflict. TERRAE INCOGNITAE, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2021, 169–171