The mercantile discovery of the world: geographical commodities in the 18th-century dictionarie of trade and commerce

The need to inform, describe, represent, and definitely provide a picture of the multilayered new colonial and commercial realities stimulated the discursive construction of British enterprise. This discourse on the commodification of geographical areas, or the transformation of places into goods, is largely included in mid-century dictionaries of trade and commerce, compiled and published in London in the 1750s. Rolt’s A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756) and Postlethwayt’s The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (2nd1757) are the primary sources for the present study. In this particular perspective, the main purpose of the study is to investigate how the geographical areas affected by (colonial) commerce are outlined, represented, ‘shaped’, and defined by their natural resources and products.