Introduction

In creating unified polities, empires set the standards for the ways that time, space, and knowledge were ordered under their rule. They made calendars, mapped ter­ritory, registered peoples, and patronized a learned elite.

While empire is a term we use to include polities from ancient Rome and early dynastic China to the much more recent British Empire, it is useful when discussing the use of measurement and quantification as tools of empire to draw a distinction between early, or pre-modern, tributary empires and those of the early modern and late imperial, or modern, periods.

Within pre-modern tributary empires the realm was universal in the sense that whatever came under its umbrella lived in the same orbit. The point of reference was always the imperial center. While distant kingdoms were not unknown, they were very much on the periphery of any imperial map—conceptual or otherwise— that might allude to their existence. Relationships with these distant kingdoms were hierarchical and tributary, but not necessarily exclusive; a small polity could be trib­utary to more than one larger kingdom or empire and, as in the case of Korea, it was possible for the same kingdom to both offer tribute and to accept it from smaller states. In China, tributaries were expected to observe the imperial calendar.²

Despite these unifying parameters, even within tributary empires different re­gions often experienced a significant degree of autonomy in terms of local practices.

¹ I would like to thank the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco, and The Newberry Library, Chicago, for the support that allowed me time to draft and revise this chapter.

² Bang and Kolodziejczyk 2012.

Laura Hostetler, Mapping, Registering, and Ordering In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang,

C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0008.

As described by Karen Barkey, pre-modern empires have “a crucially negotiated character, where different negotiations emerge from sets of relations in which state actors and elite groups are engaged.”^[599] Early empires could rarely be thoroughly au­tocratic. Rather they were characterized by a certain amount of accommodation and power sharing between central and regional interests, and between the imperial household and other elites. This relationship between imperial power and the re­gional knowledge systems that supported it is reflected in the nature of early impe­rial technologies of representation and registration. In the words of Jim Akerman, although the “connection between cartography and the exercise of imperial power is an ancient one... before the modern era, there is no consistent pattern of map use by polities to assert and consolidate mastery over populations or landscapes at a distance.”^[600] While time, space, and knowledge have been variously represented and regulated from within different world cultures, the attempt to achieve one standard across the globe is a relatively recent development.

During the early modern period we begin to see the global integration of space, a common matrix in which not only space, but also time and other systems for ordering information began to be integrated globally with common referents around the world.^[601] Beginning in the Renaissance, Mediterranean states started to experiment with direct sponsorship of science in ways that would enhance their ability to navigate farther afield, and thus allow them to benefit economically from wider networks of trade, exchange, and conquest.

Despite obvious historical and cultural differences, significant parallels existed within the ways that politics and patronage worked in these early modern centers. In various courts we see the interplay of existing and emerging epistemic models in relation to imperial self-definition across the globe. The divine—of whatever spe­cific nature—is still important in legitimizing imperial authority. Awe and wonder are very much alive, both in the meeting with other cultures and as tools of the im­perial person to induce submission and garner allegiance.

Beginning in Europe, where cartographic change was initially more thorough­going, the global integration of space, as represented on globes and through other types of coordinate mapping based on astronomical calculations, was paralleled by a roughly simultaneous process of national integration in which techniques of legibility—scaled mapping, uniform map symbols, standard systems of meas­urement, and standardization of print languages—introduced new assumptions about what it meant to be, say, French, British, Russian, Thai, Chinese, or Indian. As greater similarities, or at least similar referents, came to be shared within and among national populations, the logics of how polities were constituted gradually began to shift. Emphasis on the territorial extent and shape of individual countries, as well as the identification of their people as a people would become more impor­tant to political self-definition than other forms of legitimacy and personal pres­tige that had earlier undergirded their rulers.

During the modern period, in the course of European imperial expansion these interrelated and increasingly uniform logics of space, time, and methods of ordering information came to dominate scholarship—which became increasingly tied to empirical method—as well as the routines of everyday life. As Europeans gradually embraced these new ways of being in and observing the world, they be­came increasingly defined by them, viz. the common usage of the term “European science.” In their quest for imperial expansion, European powers applied the same methods of understanding the world around them onto territories abroad, often creating considerable conflict and economic disparity when displacing indige­nous cultural systems with the new exigencies based on logics of legibility and “efficiency.” Thus, Barkey, for example, distinguishes the nature of early imperial practices that have “one center with many differing political authority relationships between the center and the pieces of the imperial domain” from other, later, formations in which “standardized relations apply to all segments of imperial so­ciety,” describing them rather as “an alternative political formation, perhaps on the way to the nation-state.”^[603]

During the modern period, authority was increasingly derived from the pro­duction and accumulation of knowledge via scientific techniques that relied on abstraction to extract and produce knowledge at home and abroad. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this relationship between epistemic and political values was particularly characteristic of those European powers most affected by Enlightenment thinking and the political repercussions and philo­sophical implications of the French Revolution. Relatively “godless” in its orien­tation, political legitimacy was increasingly derived through the achievement of men and “rational” thought in contradistinction to the “savagery” projected onto others abroad who did not share these values and practices.

The political shifts that Barkey describes as in-between empire and nation-state largely characterize the period of European imperial dominance. They coincide precisely with the introduction of a globalizing science into the political equation that transformed the way that those who operate within its networks see their re­lationship to space, to time, and even to knowledge. Prior to the early modern and late imperial periods, empirical geographic data were valued in mapmaking in a wide variety of geographic settings; however, their use tended to be quite specific and disparate rather than integrated into the “information order” that Christopher Bayly describes, or the networks that Bruno Latour elaborates.^[605] The “general matrix of information”^[606] that emerged with the privileged place of early modern science was made possible through the global integration of space, which was facilitated through the widespread adoption of coordinate mapping, and standardization of time. During the modern period, these standardizations were forcefully imposed, primarily by European imperial powers, on parts of the world that had not already engaged in their co-creation.

Late imperial empires in other parts of the world that had earlier interacted and competed with European monarchies—perhaps seeing the threat of the rise of sec­ularism and bourgeois capitalism to their own authority—chose other paths to maintain their legitimacy.

Although there is a strong relationship between state power and mapping of var­ious kinds, as described in this chapter, it is important also to recognize that maps and census are not always the unique domain of the state. Just as empires them­selves are contested and need to balance the interests of a variety of constituencies, mapping of territory and those who inhabit it creates a vision or discourse that both individuals and groups can tap into to assert their rights to land, resources, and a legal identity vis-à-vis the state—at least in instances when the language and logic of the map or census are legible to them.^[607] Postcolonial societies have since also embraced these techniques for their own use.