On 14-15 February 2019, the Warwick-Stanford conference on 'Mapping the Global Imaginary, 1500-1900' was held at The David Rumsey Map Center. In this guest blog, Professor Kären Wigen (Stanford) explains how the items on display during the conference frame our discussions of early modern cartography, after which Dr Bertie Mandelblatt (John Carter Brown Library) illustrates her research on subsistence agriculture and the American plantation economy by focusing on an eighteenth-century estate plan produced in the French colony of Saint Domingue: the Plan géometrique de l'habitation de Mr. Guilleaume François Vallée by the royal surveyor, Mancel.