Greater Louisiana connections and conjunctures: Placing New Orleans in an Atlantic time-geographic perspective

Abstract

The place of New Orleans in the Greater Atlantic World has shifted significantly if not literally since its formal founding in the early eighteenth century. Long a favored site of human habitation and adaptation to Louisiana's coastal environments and a strategic mediation point between bayou, river, lake, and seaborne commerce and travel, the city's fortunes (and possible eventual fate) have been in part determined by its location – both in terms of relations with its ambient environment, and relative to other places and forces at work in the larger Atlantic World. This paper proposes that “time-geographic” analysis, a methodology pioneered by Swedish human geographer Torsten Hägerstrand to chart individual geo-biographic trajectories, be applied to aggregate formations – in this case one of the Atlantic World's most distinctive cities – New Orleans. In framing New Orleans in time-geographic perspective, Braudel's geohistorical scalar temporalities – “the individual” (annual and its lesser divisions), “the social” (centurial), “the geographical or structural” (millennial) – lend themselves well to differentiating the moments and modes that mark both the continuities and their disjunctions. Braudel's “conjunctural” category of half-century spans offers the appropriate metric for measuring and marking this flow. The year of the Louisiana Purchase, 1804, can be taken as the key datum point. Taking the pulse of New Orleans’ site and situation at fifty-year intervals prior to, and after, 1804 provides a conjunctural geohistory that says much about the city, but also about the relations with its Mississippian hinterland and its Gulf/Caribbean forelands. This dilation of the time-geographic perspective to the urban scale may offer new ways of viewing the geohistorical trajectories of other emblematic Atlantic cities.