Maps, Travel, & Empire

Age of Exploration (Adam Matthew, 2017)

Primary sources related to major expeditions from Columbus through Shackleton

British Library Images Online (2005– )

General database of images in BL’s collections, including thousands of maps

Curious Travellers (U. of Wales/U. of Glasgow, 2014– )

Travel narratives and correspondence of Thomas Pennant related to Romantic-era tours of Wales and Scotland

David Rumsey Map Collection (Cartography Associates, 1996– )

Rumsey’s collection of 85K+ 16c-21c maps from across the world, plus various search and comparison tools

East India Company (Adam Matthew, 2017)

900 vols. of BL’s collection of India Office Records, spanning 1595 to 1947

Empire Online (Adam Matthew, 2012)

Private and public documents, scanned largely from UK archives, detailing various nations’ colonial endeavors

Europe and Africa (Gale NCCO, 2012)

Digitized books, MSS, and news articles related to “Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest”

Europeana Maps and Geography (European Union, 2008)

Approx. 170K maps, globes, and charts from archives across Europe

Global Commodities (Adam Matthew, 2013)

Teaching and research resource organized around “15 key commodities that changed the world”

The Grand Tour (Adam Matthew, 2009)

Travel writings and art by Britons touring European art and culture sites between 1550 and 1850

Guides to the Lakes (Martin and Jean Norgate, 2016)

Extensive archive of Lake District maps, guidebooks, and travel narratives from 16c through 19c

Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology (Kim Blank, 2017– )

Innovative site offering timeline of Keats’s life, map of his London haunts, and gallery of Keatsiana

Mapping the Lakes: A Literary GIS (Lancaster U., 2011)

David Cooper and Ian Gregory’s GIS mapping of Lake District tours by Gray (1769) and Coleridge (1802)

Mapping the Republic of Letters (Stanford U., 2013– )

Interactive visualization tools for mapping networks of 18c/19c global intellectual exchange

Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature (Gale NCCO, 2015)

Primary source collection focused mainly on early 19c British cartography and travel narratives

Migration to New Worlds (Adam Matthew, 2016)

Archival docs related to immigration and resettlement to N. American and Australasia from 1800-1980

Nineteenth-Century UK Periodicals, Part II: Empire (Gale, 2012)

Complete runs of 91 British periodicals that emphasized colonial expansion and affairs

Romantic London (Matthew Sangster, 2015- )

Spatial history tool that plots sites from 9 Romantic-era books onto R. Horwood’s Plan of London

The Scottish Cemetery in Bengal (Souvik Mukherjee, 2015)

Digitized archive of cemetery for Scots and Dissenters in Calcutta

Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice (Adam Matthew, 2010)

Thematically organized database for teaching realities of slavery from Columbus through present day

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive (Gale, 2009)

Multi-part collection with 5M+ pages of legal docs, plantation records, news reports, pamphlets, etc.

Slavery Images (U. of Virginia, 2015)

Database of 1,280 depictions of slavery in the Americas gathered during multi-year collaborative project

SouthHem (Univ. Coll. Dublin, 2016– )

Resources on settler and indigenous writing in British-controlled Southern Hemisphere, 1780-1870

Travel Writing Catalogue (Sheffield Hallam U., 1998)

Early bibliographic search tool for the 994 Romantic-era travel books in the Corvey Collection

Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840 (Benjamin Colbert, 2014– )

Comprehensive bio-bibliographical database of known travel books by British and Irish women