8 - From Charts to Cartes: Translating Graphs across the Channel in the Late Eighteenth Century

Summary

THE ‘HEADS’ OF RAPIN exemplified increasing, innovative and far-flung exchanges in print – and resistance to them – and particularly across the English Channel, where exchanges of knowledge were notably strong. A hotbed of varied invention and circulation, Enlightenment Europe boasted an array of exchanges, from the lofty circles of luminaries and officials to the lower ranks of less celebrated agents of transfer.

Among the lesser-known but intriguing agents of exchange was the Scottish inventor, statistician and writer William Playfair (1759–1823). Born the son of a Kirk minister, Playfair was trained by his brother, the famed professor of the University of Edinburgh John Playfair (1748–1819) and sponsored by Scottish Enlightenment literati as well as more conventional political patrons such as Lord Shelburne. Playfair's travels in Enlighten-ment Europe, particularly in France between 1787 and 1792, are particularly illustrative of the different purposes of cross-Channel exchanges before the French Revolution.

In many respects, Playfair's endeavours and cross-Channel schemes demonstrate the various problems of often interlinked technological, industrial and intellectual transfers. The history of Playfair's activities also challenges both ‘diffusionist’ assumptions of top-down transfers (from elites to the lower ranks) and centralised perspectives (from ‘capitals’ of innovation to peripheries) in the exchange of ideas and knowledge, even though there has been much recent research on the role of ‘go-betweens’. Playfair further exemplifies striking features of the relationship between the materiality of ideas and their exchange: technical innovation, material culture and intellectual dissemination. His Parisian career as a foreign projector questions ‘from below’ issues such as the terms and modalities of exchange, the geography of transmission, the market for translations and the social and institutional reception of inventions. His career also reveals the individual initiatives and the social and personal mechanisms of patronage, sometimes straightforward and sometimes oblique, that ena-bled inventiveness and its acceptance.

THE FORTUNES OF PATRONAGE

William Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) received only a succès d’estime from the British public and the press (notably a rather lengthy and supportive review in the Scots Magazine on 1 January 1787). This was despite its genuine graphical innovativeness by the creation of redesigned line-graphs and the invention of bar charts.