William Playfair: The Commercial and Political Atlas

Edition

William Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas, “a new edition, improved” (London, John Stockdale, 1787), the second edition of the atlas first published in 1786, in the scan on the Internet Archive of the copy stamped by the British Museum (black and white, 9036 px wide). Images: plate 18, “Exports and Imports to and from Denmark & Norway from 1700 to 1780” (imprint dated 1 May 1786, scan n111), and plate 25, “Exports and Imports of Scotland ... Christmas 1780 to Christmas 1781” (imprint dated 7 June 1786, scan n153), cropped to the plates, reduced to 4000 px and with their levels stretched (40 to 215) to whiten the paper. The plates of this edition are engraved with hatching and stippling where the copies on Wikimedia Commons show colour washes. Text: the title, the legend and the imprints engraved on each plate, read on the scan (the words inside the charts, the scales and the names of places are not transcribed; the plate numbers are in the captions), with “Wm”, “1st”, “7th” and “sculpt” with their last letters in superscript as engraved; and the first two paragraphs of the “Observations on the Trade of Scotland” (p. 101), from the OCR of the scan corrected against the page image (“THE limits”, the drop capital, set as “The limits”; “much inferior in utility to those that do”; “same”; “itself at”; “consists:” with the colon of the print; “shape given”). The long s is set as s and the space printed before semicolons and colons is dropped. No transcription of the plates was found to compare with: they were read on the scan word by word.

Rights

William Playfair died in 1823 and the atlas was published in 1786 and 1787: it is in the public domain in France and in the United States.

The Internet Archive item carries no license statement; the scan is a faithful photographic reproduction of a public domain book, which creates no new right (in the United States, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 1999; in the European Union, article 14 of Directive (EU) 2019/790). Wikimedia Commons marks its copies of the same plates PD-old-100-1923 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Commercial_and_Political_Atlas,_1786).