This book has mapped the geographies of EnlightenmentEdinburgh. It has analysed the key spatialoperations that the people and institutions ofEdinburgh used to make sense of, intervene in andproduce different kinds of places on differentscales. It has explored how Edinburgh ordered theworld and made a place for itself within it. Thepreceding chapters have demonstrated that theconstruction of Edinburgh as an Enlightenmentcapital of regional, national and globalsignificance depended on a series of geographicalprocedures that implicated and impacted upon peoplesand places around the world, as well as the distantcorners of the Scottish nation, as much as thecity's environs and emerging suburbs. EnlightenmentEdinburgh was constituted partly by itsrelationships with Cramond, Crieff and China,Selkirk, Staffa and south-ern Africa. The keygeographical processes have been revealed throughanalysis of the publications that passed through anEdinburgh bookshop, of how they were produced andcirculated and of how people performed, used andinterpreted them. The book has highlighted theindividuals, relationships, social groupings andinstitutions involved in circulating and makingsense of these diverse geographical materials,exploring too the normative and performative powerof certain practices and forms of geography in thehands and collections of certain users andinstitutions. The purpose of this has been to offera richer understanding of why Edinburgh-basedmethods of mapping and describing the worldultimately ordered and structured it, withEdinburgh-produced scalar and spatial modelsextending from the city to the region and thenation, enabling a universalisation of EnlightenmentEdinburgh that emboldened imperial projects ofvarious kinds in the decades that followed. Thisconclusion summarises the key arguments of theforegoing chapters before highlighting theconnections and thematic overlaps between thegeographical processes identified in the book's fourparts. Indeed, this book's key argument is that theuniversalism of Enlightenment Edinburgh workedthrough the interconnection of various forms andpractices of geographical knowledge applied indifferent combinations and at different scales.

Compiling

Enlightenment Edinburgh's power, and its citizens’confidence in the enlightened nature of theirintervention in the world, came partly throughparticular practices of compiling. The compilationof disparate sources into new, supposedlyauthoritative and comprehensive summariescontributed to a material restructuring ofEdinburghers’ understanding of the world, reorderingEdinburgh's place in it.