For over a century, scholars have wrestled with how to imagine, explain, and convey geographical space. From Frederick Jackson Turner’s chronologically shifting frontier to Fernand Braudel’s integrated Mediterranean basin, from concepts of an ‘Atlantic’ world to arguments for an enduring ‘Red’ North American continent, scholars have offered various models for understanding the interrelationship between space and time, and people and their environments—whether on land-locked interiors, blue water empires, or the bays, estuaries, rivers, and coastlines that connect water and land.

This conference asks participants to analyse their own assumptions about and models of early modern historical spaces by engaging with and interrogating how actors themselves described, drew, and defined geographic spaces—whether discrete urban vistas, vast colonial projects, regional chorographies, interiors unmapped (by Europeans), or ever-changing maritime and riverine waters.