Matthew H. Edney

The Patronage of Science and the Creation of Imperial Space: The British Mapping of India, 1799-1843

The social and cultural contexts of the mapping of India by the British East India Company early in the nineteenth century are explored. The focus is on the privileging of the geodetic triangulation (the Great Trigonometrical Survey, or GTS) at the expense of the detailed topographic and cadastral surveys that provided the actual information necessary to run the Companys empire. The patronage of science, especially the GTS, by the Companys officials defined a conceptual image of British rule in India as rational and liberal, an image that included the social hierarchy of rational British above (supposedly) mystical and irrational Indians. Moreover, the GTS created an imperial space, a territorial uniformity that obscured the cultural and political diversity of India and allowed India to be reconstructed as a coherent and singular territorial entity. The mapping process defined the conceptual and graphic images of empire that not only allowed the British to legitimate and justify their rule, they also de...

Theory and the history of cartography

Abstract Cartographic history has been dominated by an empiricism that treats the nature of maps as self‐evident and which denies the presence of any theory. In contrast, this paper argues that theories lie at the root of all empirical study whether or not they are acknowledged. The linear, progressive model of cartographic development, for example, is not a law deduced from historical evidence; if it were it would be easily and quickly dismissed. It derives instead from our cultural beliefs concerning the nature of maps, which is to say from our unexamined theories. Historians of cartography need to be critical of their assumptions and preconceptions. Theoretical discussions in the history of cartography must address not whether we should use theory at all but to which theories we should adhere. It is inadequate simply to knock theories down. We must establish a debate in which old understandings of maps, of their creation, and of their use are replaced by better (that is, more consistent and coherent) t...

Putting “Cartography” into the History of Cartography: Arthur H. Robinson, David Woodward, and the Creation of a Discipline

Arthur Robinson and David Woodward significantly expanded the scope and nature of the history of cartography. Previously, cartographic historians had emphasized the study of map content. As practicing cartographers, Robinson and Woodward promoted the “internal” study of the history of cartographic techniques and design. Robinson used an historically minded rhetoric to define the proper nature of U.S. academic cartography after 1945 and he pursued important studies in the history of thematic mapping. Woodward pioneered the study of map printing. Moreover, he was crucial in transforming the “internal” approach to cartographic history into a discrete discipline focused on the study of maps as human documents. Woodward’s humanistic perspective ultimately formed the foundation of both the multi-volume History of Cartography and Brian Harley’s cartographic theorizing.

Simon de Passe's cartographic portrait of Captain John Smith and a new England (1616/7)

The complex image John Smith,.New England — designed and engraved by Simon de Passe (c.1595–1647) and printed in London by one George Low in 1616/7 — has attracted the attention of many historians (Figure 1). Yet disciplinary predilections have worked against any coherent assessment of the work. They have instead variously focused historians’ attention on its particular elements: general and art historians have focused on the bust of the famous adventurer and explorer Captain John Smith (1580–1631), a very few literary historians on the commendatory poem by the writing master and minor poet John Davies of Hereford (1564–1618), and map historians on the map of the coastline along which Smith had sailed during the summer of 1614. But the work is neither just a portrait nor just a map. In fact, its map components are inadequate for the kind of cartographic status traditionally ascribed to it. It is instead a reflexive image, in which the map contextualizes the bust in an act of emblematic portraiture, as part of Smith’s self-fashioning, even as the bust contextualizes the map to create a new concept of place and region, as part of Smith’s advocacy of colonization. Personally directed by Smith to an audience of merchants, gentry and some nobility, the work’s blatant iconography has the flavor more of grammar-school humanism than of the royal court’s subtlety and sophistication. The manner in which the poem instructs the reader how to intertwine the bust with the map particularly points to the relative lack of cultural refinement among its intended audience.

A história da publicação do mapa da América do Norte de John Mitchell de 1755

This article analyses the John Mitchells eight-sheet, Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, first published in 1755. This map poses a significant challenge to the traditional approaches to the History of Cartography in which maps are studied according to the regions they depict rather than the contexts within which they were made and used. In particular, we must organize our historical narratives and cartobibliographies around not the regions and places mapped, but rather the contexts within which maps were made and used.

Academic Cartography, Internal Map History, and the Critical Study of Mapping Processes

ABSTRACT Academic cartographers consistently expressed an interest in the history of map form (design and practice), at least until the 1980s. This essay reviews the formation of academic cartography, primarily in central Europe and the United States, and the scholarly work on the internal history of cartography that was clearly manifested in Imago Mundi. Internal map history catalysed the development of socio-cultural map histories after 1980 but did not itself change along those new lines. This was unfortunate because it is by paying attention to internal questions of the physical and graphic form of maps and the practices of mapping—albeit critically reconfigured as the processes of producing, circulating and consuming maps—that map historians will discover new and fertile intellectual ground.

The Anglophone Toponyms Associated with John Smith's Description and Map of New England

Abstract This article clarifies a well-known but hitherto unexamined phenomenon: the Anglophone toponyms imposed on Captain John Smiths map, New England ([1617]). It explains names that are otherwise obscure to modern historians and geographers, it considers the pattern of the new toponyms, and it allocates responsibility for the names not only to the future Charles I but also to Smith himself. It also lists the indigenous place and polity names recorded by Smith in his Description of New England (1616). It concludes with a cautionary tale concerning historiographic presumptions about the maps efficacy in shaping the adoption of toponyms by subsequent English colonists.

Cartography and Its Discontents

‘‘Deconstructing the Map’’ is the most famous of the several essays that Brian Harley wrote between 1986 and his death in 1991 (most collected in Harley 2001). Those essays crystallized the growing dissatisfaction, evinced by scholars in many disciplines, with the common understanding of the nature and history of modern cartography. They have prompted scholars to look at cartography in new ways and so to ask new kinds of questions about maps; turning scholarly attention to new dimensions of modern cartography, they have also promoted a positive interest in pre-modern and non-Western mapping traditions. ‘‘Deconstructing’’ and the other essays have had immense influence, not only in the English-speaking world, but also in Europe and South America, and have attracted

A Cautionary Historiography of John Smith's New England

Abstract This essay reviews 150 years of commentary on John Smiths famous map of New England. This commentary encompasses several disciplines, as well as both academic and popular writing, but has been structurally consistent: each account of the map is brief and repeats a received wisdom that largely contradicts the small body of empirical evidence. The structure of the received wisdom is analysed to reveal the powerful web of beliefs and convictions that constitute the modern cartographic ideal. These beliefs feature some 11 myths of observation, evaluation, representation, individuality, progress, ontology, publicity, currency, morality, functionality (or instrumentality), and efficacy. Concerned only to evaluate the map image, historians have selectively interpreted the evidence to present Smiths map as an icon of discovery, exploration, cartography, intellectual dominance, and European civilization. The essay therefore constitutes a cautionary tale of the pitfalls that await the unwary and uncritic...

A Content Analysis of Imago Mundi, 1935–2010

ABSTRACT The 592 research articles in the first 62 volumes of Imago Mundi, from 1935 to 2010, are analysed to discern trends in the scholarly approaches, biases and interests of historians of cartography. Particular attention is paid to map historians’ preferred historical periods and topical subjects of study, to their nationalistic tendencies and to the shifting importance of traditional, internal and socio-cultural approaches to map history.