Transatlantic travel narratives were popular in England during the eighteenth century, driven by metropolitan curiosity of the manners, customs, inhabitants, and natural resources of non-European lands. The circulation of such books, many of them printed cheaply, was supported by their easy accessibility in circulating and subscription libraries and the lack of international copyright laws. 

American literary scholar Joseph Rezek has explored what he calls the “racialization of print,” a centuries-long process, beginning in the early modern period, by which printed materials became associated with ideologies of racial hierarchy. This process was shaped by the medium’s changing associations with evolving social categories such as class, gender, religion, and nation, which allowed certain actors to use “print as a technology to subdue, control, commodify, and dehumanize colonized and enslaved people.” The material texts in this section of the exhibition demonstrate print’s association with the racial hierarchies that shaped the long eighteenth century and made documents like the 1772 map of Belvidere possible.