The Map That Changed the World Read Online Free PDF

seven governments during just the first decade of his reign). * The population now could and did display its anger and its pleasure at matters of which it came to know. The people could rant against unfairnesses—the naval press-gang, say, which was still much in operation in the port cities. They could cheer and argue over the spread of civil rights—John Wilkes, the “Friend of Liberty,” was a prisoner in the Tower † when Smith was born; Thomas Paine was marshaling the ideas that would eventually lead him to write The Age of Reason ; Edmund Burke was well into his career as the foremost liberal thinker of his time. ‡
    By 1781—by which time William Smith was a twelve-year-old boy—Samuel Johnson was calling the English “a nation of readers.” Few were the major towns that did not have a library. Few were the shop signs in the streets that did not show the name of the merchant instead of merely a picture of what he sold. It was assumed, and with reason, that sufficient numbers of passersby would have no difficulty reading the words on the boards—something that preceding generations (and many on the Continent even then) would have found a considerable challenge.
    No matter the outcry that allowing the working classes to become educated was to debauch them and tempt them to abandon the manual labors for which they were best suited. “Nineteen in twenty of the species were designed by nature for trade and manufacture,” said a writer in The Grub-Street Journal at the time of Smith’s birth. “To take them off to read books is the way to do them harm, to make them not wiser or better, but impertinent, troublesome and factious.” That kind of thinking was rapidly to become outmoded during the years when Smith was growing up: Whatever the political outcome—whatever the effect of the new phenomenon of public opinion, which literacy, communication, newspapers, and libraries encouraged—the nation, save for its most reactionary elements, seemed generally prepared to come to terms with the new mood for change.
     
    W illiam Smith’s formative years unrolled through a period that was both astonishingly vibrant and deeply challenging. Advances were firmly under way in almost all applied areas of science and philosophy, and in social change and artistic endeavor as well. But there was still a terrible hesitation about humans’ understanding of the most fundamental questions of why they were where they were, who had placed them there, what was the point, what were their origins, what was their fate?
    The hesitation was deep rooted; it stemmed, at least in part, from the frank reluctance of eighteenth-century men and women to accept that there even was a need to know and wonder at such things. To inquire with true rigor into matters that lay at the heart and soul of his and all society’s beliefs smacked, indisputably, of heresy. Even by the time that young William Smith was starting to take advantage of the world’s new and inquiring mood, there was still the wide acceptance—not yet contradicted by any evidence that seemed to matter—that God had created both human beings and all the world in which theylived. That was that: No more needed to be said.
    And yet. A very few bold and more radically inclined thinkers—Joseph Priestley, one of the discoverers of oxygen, and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, among them * —were beginning, in these same extraordinary years, to take a more muscular and skeptical approach to the received wisdom of the Church. By the time Smith was coming to his maturity, questions about these fundamentals were being asked by more than the mere metropolitan sophisticates. The hunch that God might not have done precisely as Bishop Ussher had suggested, or during the time he calculated, was beginning to be tested by real thinkers, by rationalists, by radically inclined scientists who were bold enough to challenge both the dogma and the law, the clerics and the courts.
    There was