Cartographic Representations

Spatial imaginaries, of course, can also take the form of cartographic representations. The historical analysis of maps from the viewpoint of visual rhetoric and the production of space gathered momentum since the late 1980s, in conjunction with ‘the spatial turn.’

There were, however, important antecedents in cognate disciplines. In 1974, David Woodward, a British-born American cartographer, published an article on the state of the art in his discipline. Woodward worked for many years as curator of maps and cartographic expert at the Newberry Library in Chicago, before returning in 1980 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he had conducted his doctoral research. Woodward lamented what he perceived as a lack of theoretical foundation to the history of cartography. With its principal focus on the technical aspects of map making, cartography seemed to have lost its intellectual raison d’être.237

A key intervention was made by Woodward’s close colleague Brian Harley. In the 1980s, Harley made a case for dissecting the ‘hidden agendas of cartography’ as tools of socio-spatial power.238 After more than 25 years in British academia, Harley relocated to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1986. Together with Woodward, he launched the epic History of Cartography project. This became instrumental in establishing the field of critical cartography.239 Harley largely dispensed with questions around accuracy and technological sophistication. Instead, he advanced a cultural theory-informed reading of maps – one which lay bare both their ‘external’ and ‘internal’ power. Such an approach naturally focused on the question of who was behind the creation of a given map – a state agency, for example. However, it also posed the question of which discursive and socially-embedded forces were at work in producing a map.

As mentioned in the introduction to Doing Spatial History, ‘deconstructing’ a map means lifting the veil on the cartographical ideal of ‘objectivity,’ ‘accuracy’ and ‘truthfulness,’ revealing the ‘tricks of the cartographic trade’ and unpacking the ‘set of rules’ inherent to them. It entails the delineation of a particular, historically and culturally conditioned ‘mode of visual representation.’240 Harley’s suggested approach to maps has obvious parallels with the approach of his fellow historical geographer Denis Cosgrove’s to landscapes, and with that of John Berger to art: They are a ‘way of seeing.’241

In the 1990s, historians began to pick up on these developments. Jeremy Black and others helped to bring maps as a source to the attention of fellow historians. Soon thereafter, authors such as Jeremy Brotton and Simon Garfield made maps accessible and exciting for a wider public.242 Another important impulse for incorporating maps into the historian’s source base came from Benedict Anderson. In the 1991 edition of his famous book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, Anderson added the chapter ‘Census, Map, Museum.’ In this short and programmatic chapter, Anderson argued that maps were pivotal to the process of nation-building. The production of ‘historical maps’ served the purpose of creating a ‘political-biographical narrative’ and of demonstrating the supposed ‘antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial units.’ Originating from the imperial practice of cartographically colour-coding colonies (pink-red in the British case, purple-blue for the French), maps of nation-states entailed a ‘“jigsaw” effect’ that rendered territories seemingly detachable, ‘instantly recognizable’ and ‘everywhere visible’: a ‘logo-map’ which ‘penetrated deep into the popular imagination.’243

Anderson’s book became a springboard and key reference point for a number of historians who asked explicitly spatial questions of maps. The history of cartography has since become a field of cross-disciplinary scholarship, with rich engagement from cartographers, geographers and historians.244 When surveying the research landscape of the past few decades, three broad areas of interest can be identified: the mapping of nations, borderlands, and empires. The work of historian and urban scholar Josef Konvitz offers an early example of critical map studies on the national plane. In 1987, Konvitz explored the link between statecraft and cartography in the mapping of France during the ‘long eighteenth century.’ This cartographic enterprise was carried out primarily by four generations of the Cassini family; the result was the Carte Générale de la France (1747-1818), also known as the ‘map of Cassini.’ It was initially commissioned by Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the 1660s. Their goal was to obtain a more granular image of their territory, and to make it ‘legible’ (James C. Scott) as an object of taxation. The map of Cassini promoted the idea of the hexagon as the seemingly natural shape of France, and it produced an image of France as linguistically homogenous. It gave preference to standardised French for place names and silenced the numerous other languages spoken in France at the time, thus marginalizing lived experience on the ground.245

The influence of Harley and Konvitz is very much evident in Topographies of the Nation (2002) by David Gugerli and Daniel Speich Chassé, two Swiss historians of science and technology. Their book is a reconstruction of the making of the Topographical Map of Switzerland in the nineteenth century. This document has since become known as the ‘map of Dufour,’ because it was named after army officer, engineer and cartographer Guillaume Henri Dufour, who founded the Swiss Federal Office of Topography. As the book shows, the survey of the Alpine landscape was certainly a technical feat. Yet the authors emphasise the purpose and uses of the map, which served as an effective means of communicating the idea of a national territory to a wider audience. One striking example of this was the display of ‘the Dufour’ at a national exhibition in Zürich.246

The similarly mountainous province of Shinano in Japan is explored in Kären Wigen’s A Malleable Map (2010). This book explores Japan’s rich ‘chorographic archive’ (place-writing) in the form of maps, gazetteers, geographical textbooks, statistical yearbooks, and regional newspapers. Wigen traces the transformation – or rather the ‘restoration’ – of Shinano into today’s Nagano prefecture. She is able to dissect the important role of regional identities in nation-formation, while contributing to cultural geographic understandings of the role of maps in knowledge production and cultural workings of scale.247

Latin Americanist Raymond Craib has focused on the case of Mexico to show how government-directed map making was instrumental in producing a seemingly natural and coherent territory. Against the backdrop of its colonial origins, as well as border disputes, maps were an effective (though not unchallenged) tool to both ‘stage’ Mexico as a sovereign state, and to transform it from a ‘space’ to a ‘place’ with which citizens could identify. Maps were adorned, for instance, with artistic imagery that provided ‘a visual, historical, and spatial anchor to the plotted points of the abstract grid.’ This added a layer of ‘foundational mythology’ to ‘the coordinates that covered, and connected, a cartographic Mexico.’ Craib explicitly calls his study a ‘spatial history of Mexico.’ He draws inspiration from a range of scholars, including Harley, Harvey, Lefebvre, and Paul Carter. His book provides an illuminating example of a study situated at the crossroads of spatial theory, the history of cartography, and – with a focus on property regimes – social history.248

Of course, maps were used not only with the intention of consolidating territory but also with the aim of expanding it. As mentioned in the introduction to Doing Spatial History, the legacy of cartography in Weimar and Nazi Germany partly explains why many German historians after 1945 shied away from including maps in their work, even for merely illustrative purposes. Two important studies by geographer Guntram Herb and historian David Thomas Murphy, both published in 1997, offer a critical and suitably contextualized engagement with German map making in the first half of the twentieth century. They elucidate the ‘use value’ of various kinds of maps – from post-Versailles Treaty revisionism to National Socialist expansionism. They draw on several kinds of maps, from the ‘scientific’ variant, which maintained an aura of objective accuracy, to more ‘suggestive’ maps. The later were replete with starkly black-and-white visual rhetoric and swooping arrows; they made no bones about their propagandistic goals.249 Relevant here is Kristin Kopp’s more recent analysis of Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (2012). This book offers a Harley- and Anderson-inspired model of how to ‘read’ maps. It casts a close eye on ‘sign systems’ and colour-coding in order to lay bare the (German) territorial claims and (Polish) ethnographic silences inscribed in maps.250

Indeed, East Central Europe has been a particularly contested region, marked by wars, imperial contests, and the constant redrawing of borders. Historian Steven Seegel has taken the long view here, from the late eighteenth century to the Treaty of Versailles. His work on Russian cartography provides an analysis of military, ethnographic and linguistic maps, as well as state-sponsored topographical surveys, geographical writings, and cartographic classroom material. Seegel draws on, but also problematises, Anderson’s arguments. He focuses on a region contested by empires, ‘small nations,’ and ‘fantasy spaces’ such as ‘European Russia,’ ‘Habsburg Galicia,’ or a German-dominated ‘Central Europe’ (Mitteleuropa). In such regions, maps ‘were intended not only to describe the empire’s multi-ethnic lands and peoples between apparent “natural boundaries,” but also to civilize designated regions by applying […] Orientalist hierarchies to legitimize the conquest and retention of land.’251

The contours of Anderson’s ‘logo map’ become equally blurred in Alsace-Lorraine, another contested European border region. This case has been examined by Catherine Dunlop in Cartophilia (2015). The border between France and Germany, or the German lands, constantly shifted between 1792 and 1918. Against this background, cartographic material became instrumental in disputes over territorial claims. There was no one ‘logo map’ here. Naturally, the cartographic battle over Alsace and Lorraine was fought by official cartographers in distant Berlin and Paris. Moreover, however, it was also fought regionally and locally, by classroom teachers, geographical societies, and amateur mapmakers. Harley suggested that state-sponsored maps may have ‘“desocialized” territories […] by reducing the social and cultural complexity of territory to a coldly calculated system of signs and measurements.’ Dunlop, however, places much emphasis on maps as a ‘positive form of self-identification for members of a society.’ ‘Mapping nations into being’ also involved on-the-ground ‘counter-mapping,’ through ‘village maps, hiking maps, and urban maps.’252

Matthew Edney’s landmark study Mapping an Empire (1997) was published nearly two decades before Seegel’s and Dunlop’s work. Edney followed more closely in Harley’s footsteps. The influence of Said, Foucault, and Paul Carter is also evident. This book focuses on the process of mapping British India in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Edney draws on examples such as James Rennell’s ‘Bengal Atlas’ (1779) and ‘Map of Hindoostan’ (1782) in order to demonstrate in great detail that geographical knowledge production and map making were fundamental to imperial control: ‘To govern territories, one must know them.’

Edney shows how the perceived accuracy of the data gathered and the maps produced were transformed by the introduction of triangulation as a mathematical framework for surveying. The trigonometrical basis of triangulation provided what Edney describes as a ‘technological fix’ for human error in the surveying process. This brought the East India Company ever closer to their ‘cartographic ideal.’ As Edney writes, ‘at one uniform scale, all portions of Indian space became directly comparable and normalized.’ This homogenization of knowledge, however imperfect and incomplete in reality, acted as ‘a disciplinary mechanism, a technology of vision and control, which was integral to British authority in South Asia.’253 From the late nineteenth century, this kind of ‘command cartography’ was subverted by Indian artists and printmakers. As ‘barefoot cartographers,’ these actors produced a variety of anthropomorphic maps and cartographic images of ‘Mother India.’ This is vividly depicted in Sumathi Ramaswamy’s The Goddess and the Nation (2010), a fascinating mix of visual history, history of cartography, and gender studies.254

Toponymy, the study of place names, takes centre stage in Daniel Foliard’s more recent reading of British imperial maps. Foliard is clearly inspired by Lewis and Wigen’s The Myth of Continents, as well as by the work of other geographers such as Felix Driver, Derek Gregory, and again Brian Harley. He traces the origins of the term ‘Middle East’ through British maps from the mid nineteenth century. In fact, it was only during the heyday of Britain’s multi-directional expansion that the term became commonplace. This process was shaped by maps, which served not only as a form of geographical knowledge, but also as an expression of ignorance. In both regards, maps proved crucial for forging a notion of the ‘Middle East’ in the context of a rapidly growing market of map readers. As Foliard shows, map making can thus be understood as a performative act.255

Already before the publication of Foliard’s book, mass-market cartography had served as a prominent subject in Susan Schulten’s The Geographical Imagination in America (2001). This contribution also examined school geography and the National Geographic.256 Cartography had once been a ‘science of princes.’257 By the late nineteenth century, however, it had entered the realm of mass consumption. Maps became much more widely available, in the form of school and world atlases, as well as war atlases – war, after all, was often a prime mover in transforming, and globalising, geographical imaginations. At the same time, maps also began to appear as ‘tools of inquiry,’ in fields such as science, medicine, education, and governance. This second point is emphasised in Schulten’s more recent book Mapping the Nation (2012). Designed with the intent to ‘identify spatial patterns and relationships,’ a whole range of new types of maps emerged during the nineteenth century. This included weather maps, climate maps, census maps, medical maps, maps of Indigenous migrations (such as Emma Willard’s 1828 map), and maps amounting to a ‘cartography of slavery.’ ‘The world we inhabit today – saturated with maps and graphic information,’ writes Schulten, ‘grew from this sea change in spatial thought and representation.’258

Various other examples in the history of cartography have tended to highlight the interrelationship between geographical knowledge, territorial control, and social homogenisation. Schulten’s study, however, focuses on maps deliberately created as visual arguments that could show both national coherence and internal fragmentation – socially, medically, ethnically, and environmentally. As can be gleaned from John F. Smith’s Historical Geography (1888) or Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932), they could also map time.259 Exploring the multitude of ‘cartographic representations of temporality’ has now evolved into a particularly promising trend in the history of cartography.260

Like the nineteenth century, the twentieth century was also a crucial period in the evolution of map making. This is the subject of William Rankin’s important study After the Map (2016). Rankin’s book is informed by spatial theory, and it is situated at the intersection of the history of cartography, infrastructure and territoriality. He identifies an ‘epistemic shift’ which occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. During the First World War, a latitude and longitude-based form of spatial representation was still dominant. By the time of the Cold War, however, a dotted grid-system had been put to widespread use. Rankin argues that this new ‘geo-epistemology’ was precipitated by technologies like civil aviation as well as nuclear and other long-distance weapon systems. This epistemology was no longer beholden to any truth claims, but put utility first. After the Map thus points to coordinate-based visual moves beyond cartographic representation.261

Siam Mapped

As mentioned, when Benedict Anderson published an updated edition of his pioneering Imagined Communities in 1991, he added a chapter titled ‘Census, Map, Museum.’ In the preface to the new edition, he confessed to having become ‘uneasily aware that what I had believed to be a significantly new contribution to thinking about nationalism – changing apprehensions of time – patently lacked its necessary coordinate: changing apprehensions of space. A brilliant doctoral thesis by Thongchai Winichakul, a young Thai historian, stimulated me to think about mapping’s contribution to the nationalist imagination.’262 The thesis that inspired Anderson to take up the question of space and maps was published a few years later in 1994 as Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation.263

In the reissue of Imagined Communities, more than half of the new material dedicated to maps comprises a summary of Thongchai’s arguments. In this way, Anderson’s classic text on nationalism has introduced countless students to the key theses of Siam Mapped. Thongchai argues that, up until the mid-nineteenth century, visual depictions of space in Siam (today’s Thailand) were different, more diverse, and could simultaneously represent sacred topographies of pilgrimage and power as well as the sovereignty of kingship. Siam Mapped also shows how concepts that resembled Western boundaries existed in pre-modern Siam, but that they functioned very differently. All of the Thai terms denoted areas or frontiers – ‘thick lines’ with a ‘broad horizontal extent’ – which existed between limits of territory. Thongchai also contends that the increasing dominance of a new science of mapping and surveying from the mid-century onwards played a decisive role in the emergence of a new abstract bounded territory. This was, in fact, the recognisable geo-body of a modern Siamese nation.264

As a spatial history, Siam Mapped embraced several of the approaches addressed in this guide. It explored lived practices in Siam’s boundary zones; the complex spatial implications of shared sovereignty between the various polities in the region; and the evolving Thai lexicons of space. In terms of its specific contribution to thinking about maps and space, Thongchai’s most important contribution comes in the book’s fifth to eighth chapters. These comprise a narrative of the rise of the geo-body of Siam.

Thongchai lays bare the inner mechanics of a new science of mapping. First, the material production of these maps were spatial claims on territory. These were deployed – like soldiers – in the frontier disputes between Siam and its encroaching French and British imperial neighbours. The geo-body of Siam was created out of the ‘space left over from direct colonialism’ in French Indochina and British Burma. However, as Siam abandoned its Indigenous practices of political space and shared sovereignty, it ceased to be a mere victim of Western colonialism.265 This brings us to Thongchai’s second point: the new science of mapping played a crucial role in a comprehensive ‘internal’ campaign of modernising ‘reforms.’ This programme concealed Siam’s own campaign of conquest and domination over polities that had once enjoyed broad autonomy and claimed multiple overlords.266 Once Siam was ‘bounded’ externally, and its multiple internal sovereignties flattened, the new geo-body was complete. It became a powerful symbol, anachronistically projected into the past in the process of creating national narratives of history.267

  1. David Woodward, ‘The Study of the History of Cartography: A Suggested Framework,’ American Cartographer 1, 1974, 101-15. This was not to suggest that the technical aspects of map making were somehow trivial. Mapping collected data by surveying a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface is a complex undertaking. It is usually a multi-step, multi-layered, multi-site process. It comprises the surveying of terrain and collecting of data on site through collective fieldwork; a choice of scale and projection; sketching and printing onto a copper plate or lithographic stone. Authorship is often difficult to determine. For a particularly fascinating case of a map of unknown authorship, an early seventeenth-century hand-painted map of East Asia, which has only recently been rediscovered, see Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.↩︎

  2. J.B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map,’ Cartographica 26/2, 1989, 1-20, here 3; id., ‘Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,’ Imago Mundi 40, 1988, 57-76; on Harley see, especially, Matthew H. Edney, The Origins and Development of J.B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005; Denis Wood, ‘The Map as a Kind of Talk: Brian Harley and the Confabulation of the Inner and Outer Voice,’ Visual Communication 1/2, 2002, 139-61; see also Daniel Clayton, ‘“Snapshots of a Moving Target”: Harley/Foucault/Colonialism,’ Cartographica 50, 2015, 18-23.↩︎

  3. J.B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987-present. Since 2005, this monumental project has been directed by Matthew H. Edney. The two latest volumes are Matthew H. Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley (eds.), Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020; Mark Monmonier (ed.), Cartography in the Twentieth Century, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.↩︎

  4. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map,’ 5, 7, 12; see also Jeremy W. Crampton, ‘Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization,’ Progress in Human Geography 25, 2001, 235-52. This tendency has been taken further more recently by Matthew H. Edney, who has made a compelling case for debunking the ‘ideal of cartography’ as a whole. Edney suggests to confine the meaning of the term ‘cartography’ to ‘Western’ Enlightenment-style map making, and to no longer use it in a more generic sense. ‘Map studies’ and ‘map history’ would be more appropriate terms here. Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019, p. 8.↩︎

  5. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: BBC and Penguin, 1972; see also the section above on ’Nature, Environment, and Landscape. In this vein, see most recently Veronica della Dora, The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021.↩︎

  6. See Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997; id., Maps and Politics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997; id., Visions of the World: A History of Maps, London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003; Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, New York: Penguin, 2012; id., Great Maps: The World’s Masterpieces Explored and Explained, London: Dorling Kindersley, 2014; Simon Garfield, On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, New York: Gotham Books, 2012; see also Peter Barber and Tom Harper (eds.), Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, London: The British Library, 2010; for an earlier example see John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers, London: Pimlico, 1981, rev. ed. 2000; a key work in the German context was Ute Schneider, Die Macht der Karten: Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute, Darmstadt: Primus, 2004, 4th rev. ed. 2018; see also Christof Dipper and Ute Schneider (eds.), Kartenwelten: Der Raum und seine Repräsentation in der Neuzeit, Darmstadt: Primus, 2006.↩︎

  7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 1991 first published 1983, pp. 163, 174-5; see also Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.↩︎

  8. See, especially, Alan M. MacEachren, How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design, New York: Guilford Press, 1995; Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991, rev. 3rd ed. 2018; Norman J.W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (rev. ed. of Maps and Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture and Civilization, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, London: Routledge, 1993; Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006, French 1992; see also the more recent work by Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010; id., Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography, Redlands: Esri Press, 2019; Denis Wood with John Fels and John Krygier, Rethinking the Power of Maps, New York: Guilford Press, 2010; as well as Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015; Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, When Maps Become the World, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020; an accessible guide to the history of cartographic conventions offers Mick Ashworth, Why North Is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From, Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2019; for a useful handbook see Alexander Kent and Peter Vujakovic (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography, New York: Routledge, 2018.↩︎

  9. Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660-1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, with a foreword by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie; see also Christine Marie Petto, When France was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007; id., Mapping and Charting in Early Modern England and France: Power, Patronage, and Production, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015; see more generally Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.↩︎

  10. David Gugerli and Daniel Speich, Topografien der Nation: Politik, kartografische Ordnung und Landschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Zürich: Chronos, 2002; see also Daniel Speich, ‘Mountains Made in Switzerland: Facts and Concerns in Nineteenth-Century Cartography,’ Science in Context 22, 2009, 387-408.↩︎

  11. Kären Wigen, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010; see also id., Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas (eds.), Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016; as well as Carolien Stolte, ‘Map-Making in World History: An Interview with Kären Wigen,’ Itinerario 39, 2015, 203-14; see also Kären Wigen, ‘Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment,’ Journal of Japanese Studies 31/1, 2005, 1-26; on visual representations and political territorializations of mountains, see more generally Veronica della Dora, Mountain: Nature and Culture, London: Reaktion, 2016; Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz, The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015; on early modern chorography more generally, see the concise overview by Andrew McRae, ‘Early Modern Chorographies,’ Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015. Available HTTP: <https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-102> (accessed 31 March 2021); on chorography and late medieval English maps, see Matthew Boyd Goldie, Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019, pp. 18-54.↩︎

  12. Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 7, 34; see also id., ‘Cartography and Decolonization,’ in James R. Akerman (ed.), Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017, pp. 11-71; equally inspired by Harley and Lefebvre is Ricardo Padron, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004; see also id., The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020; Nancy P. Applebaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016; Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, esp. part 3 (‘The Colonization of Space’); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008; on Indigenous mapping see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996; id., ‘History in Maps from the Aztec Empire,’ in Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer (eds.), Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 79-102; Reuben Rose-Redwood et al., ‘Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings,’ Cartographica 55/3, 2020, 151-62; as well as Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.↩︎

  13. Guntram Henrik Herb, Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda, 1918-1945, London: Routledge, 1997; David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997; Ulrike Jureit, Das Ordnen von Räumen: Territorium und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2012.↩︎

  14. Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, esp. chapter 4.↩︎

  15. Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 6; see also his more recent work Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018; as well as Catherine Gibson, ‘Shading, Lines, Colors: Mapping Ethnographic Taxonomies of European Russia,’ Nationalities Papers 46, 2018, 592-611; Jennifer Keating, ‘Imperial Maps,’ in George Gilbert (ed.), Reading Russian Sources: A Student’s Guide to Text and Visual Sources from Russian History, London and New York, 2020, pp. 61-76; Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi and Catherine Gibson (eds.), Central Europe through the Lens of Language and Politics: On the Sample Maps from the Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe, Sapporo: Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2017; for an analysis of ethnographic maps in the Russian empire and the ‘making of Lithuanians,’ see Vytautas Petronis, Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, ca. 1800-1914, Stockholm: Intellecta, 2007; see also, in this context, the chapter by Bernhard Struck in Bavaj, Lawson and Struck (eds.), Doing Spatial History.↩︎

  16. Catherine Dunlop, Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 7-8, 11-12, 14 (original emphasis); see J.B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge, and Power,’ in Cosgrove and Daniels (eds.), Iconography of Landscape, pp. 277-312, here p. 303. The term ‘counter-maps’ is borrowed from Nancy Lee Peluso, ‘Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,’ Antipode 27, 1995, 383-406; see also the more recent adaptation in Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016, esp. pp. 20-2.↩︎

  17. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 1, 25-6, 39; see also James R. Akerman (ed.), The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009; for the adoption of modern mapping techniques in the building of the Qing empire in southwest China, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001.↩︎

  18. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 33-55, 236; for context, see also Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.↩︎

  19. Daniel Foliard, Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017, pp. 4-7; for nineteenth-century German and European geographical views on Africa, see Iris Schröder, Das Wissen von der ganzen Welt: Globale Geographien und räumliche Ordnungen Afrikas und Europas 1790-1870, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011.↩︎

  20. Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America 1880-1950, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001; see also, in this context, Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; id. (ed.), Early American Cartographies, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; id., The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017; for an earlier ‘publishing boom’ in Late Ming China, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, see Alexander Akin, East Asian Cartographic Print Culture: The Late Ming Publishing Boom and its Trans-Regional Connections, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.↩︎

  21. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge, and Power,’ p. 281.↩︎

  22. Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 2-3, 8, 127-33 (‘cartography of slavery’); see also id., A History of America in 100 Maps, London: The British Library, 2018; for case studies on female mapmakers see Christina E. Dando, Women and Cartography in the Progressive Era, London and New York: Routledge, 2018; Catherine Gibson, ‘Mapmaking in the Home and Printing House: Women and Cartography in Late Imperial Russia,’ Journal of Historical Geography 67, 2020, 71-80; for a model study on medical maps, see Pamela K. Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004; on the relationship between statistics, cartography, and the ‘social body,’ see Wolfgang Göderle, Zensus und Ethnizität: Zur Herstellung von Wissen über soziale Wirklichkeiten im Habsburgerreich zwischen 1848 und 1910, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016; Jason D. Hansen, Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848-1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; on cartographic representations of the physical world, see Denis Wood and John Fels, The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008.↩︎

  23. See Schulten, Mapping the Nation, pp. 41-76; id., ‘How Place Became Process: The Origins of Time Mapping in the United States,’ in Wigen and Winterer (eds.), Time in Maps, pp. 171-92.↩︎

  24. The recent volume by Wigen and Winterer (eds.), Time in Maps, shows a great variety of approaches to ‘decoding temporal messages’ in what is typically considered a ‘spatial medium.’ Id., ‘Introduction: Maps Tell Time,’ in ibid., pp. 1-13, here p. 2; see also Zef Segal and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze (eds.), Motion in Maps, Maps in Motion: Mapping Stories and Movement Through Time, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.↩︎

  25. William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016; on Cold War cartography, see also Timothy Barney, Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015; Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010; id., ‘Cold War Planet,’ in Domosh, Heffernan and Withers (eds.), Handbook of Historical Geography, vol. 2, pp. 519-36.↩︎

  26. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. xiii-xiv.↩︎

  27. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.↩︎

  28. Anderson’s summary is in Imagined Communities, pp. 171-4.↩︎

  29. Thongchai, Siam Mapped, p. 131.↩︎

  30. Ibid., pp. 143-9.↩︎

  31. Ibid., pp. 150-6.↩︎