Le Jeu du monde: Games, Maps, and World Conquest in Early Modern France

Chang, Ting

Le Jeu du monde: Games, Maps, and World Conquest in Early Modern France

Chang, Ting

Authors

TING CHANG TING.CHANG@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Associate Professor

Contributors

Angela Vanhaelen
Editor

Bronwen Wilson
Editor

Citation

Chang, T. (2022). Le Jeu du monde: Games, Maps, and World Conquest in Early Modern France. In A. Vanhaelen, & B. Wilson (Eds.), Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen (201-236). Toronto and Los Angeles: University of Toronto Press and UCLA Clark Memorial Library series

Acceptance Date	Aug 7, 2021
Online Publication Date	Dec 30, 2022
Publication Date	Dec 30, 2022
Deposit Date	Jan 18, 2023
Publisher	University of Toronto Press and UCLA Clark Memorial Library series
Pages	201-236
Series Title	UCLA Clark Memorial Library series
Book Title	Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen
Chapter Number	8
ISBN	9781487544935
Public URL	https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/16223958
Related Public URLs	https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctv31nzkpm https://utorontopress.com/9781487544935/making-worlds/
Additional Information	This essay examines a group of interrelated boardgames and maps produced in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that invited particular forms of engagement. By mobilizing the senses these objects enabled a virtual experience of travel through spaces in the world. I analyze the ways in which maps and educational games encouraged French expansion into foreign territories, fostering and rehearsing through play the formation of colonial and imperial subjects. A phenomenological study of interacting with map-based boardgames, playing cards and map puzzles that dovetailed with the history of French cartography, which was attendant in turn on broader European efforts to chart and dominate the globe, suggests that the above objects offered creative ways to make and unmake the early modern world.