Overview
This chapter addresses mapping, registering, and ordering as they are situated within the broader context of space, time, and knowledge. It takes as its particular focus the emergence of coordinate mapping as a tool of imperial expansion and control from the Renaissance through the mid-twentieth century.
The work of James C. Scott on legibility in modern state building underlies the basic premise of the chapter.[608] As Scott describes it, “Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with governing.” For this reason they need to “assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.”[609] This distance and the abstract nature of assessment were intensified in instances where imperial officials imposed policies born of considerations of legibility on their colonial others. “Typifications” required standard units in which to conceptualize and record the details necessary to administration. This included not only maps, but also weights, measures, forms of land ownership, and even the categorization of peoples—initially according to ethnic or caste categories, and later by race. This information was subsequently recorded on maps and in charts and other forms of documents. Knowledge became increasingly defined by the ability to measure, count, and quantify. The resulting documents not only recorded, but also shaped the land and peoples that they described. Whether within the nation, or on the imperial frontier, the legal and conceptual categories shaped by the requirement of legibility shaped the landscape and the possibilities of imperial subjects both at home and abroad.Recent literature in the increasingly interdisciplinary field of the history of cartography has been especially helpful in conceptualizing and compiling the substance of this chapter.
Beginning with the work of J. B. Harley, the field of the history of cartography has come to recognize that mapping—whether of territories, peoples, or knowledge systems—is a way of conceptualizing and representing information for specific purposes. Maps do not have to be cartographic, but can be literary, pictorial, or conceptual.[610] They are also emblematic of the late imperial European gaze, and so will receive a fair amount of attention here as a form of knowledge that orders the world. Whatever form they take, they are always persuasive documents. Maps are never “neutral, or value-free.”[611] They have been used to delimit territory, facilitate the movement of troops and of goods, collect revenue, repair water works, support mercantile pursuits, make records of exploration, protect individual property rights, and of course mark out routes for individual travelers.[612] They are also often objects of beauty, and as such are both admired and collected, thus extending and perpetuating their claims.[613]Maps do not exist in a vacuum, but are a product of the forces in society that they serve and the work of individual mapmakers. As such, they are also “part and parcel of the continual renegotiation of status and authority between representatives of a polity, local vested interests, and perhaps other power structures such as religious institutions.”[614] Because of the primacy of their role in representing—and also creating—the realities that their commissioners want to see represented, maps employ rhetorical codes and stylistic features most conducive to the arts of persuasion. Today this usually means using scientific techniques of scaled measurement by which we measure accuracy. However, the shift from literary and other maps of empire to cartographic representations tied closely to measurement and quantitative analysis occurred gradually. Scientific mapping did not supplant other forms of geographic knowing and representation overnight, whether in Europe or elsewhere. And, even scientific imperial maps often included significant iconographic symbolism in their decorative cartouches well into the nineteenth century.
Even today, non-scientific, or non-cartographic forms of representation such as literature can augment, supplement, or contest the view that cartographic maps represent.J. B. Harley further cracked open the field of the history of cartography by insisting that maps could be read as texts, and with the same tools of critical analysis. Understanding that modern scientific maps are fundamentally rhetorical or persuasive documents has been extremely helpful to historians of cartography in deepening their analysis. Late imperial scientific maps simply rely on accuracy in measurement as the most persuasive map language available to them, and thus the most effective way to gain the confidence of their constituencies. Reading and even deconstructing cartographic maps as texts allow us to reveal the techniques of persuasive argument used in the creation and perpetuation of empire, and later of nation-states, and also to think fruitfully about what is not represented, but rather silenced, on those maps.[615] As Bernard Cohn has demonstrated, similar critiques can be applied to schematic representations of populations.[616]
In The Colonizer’s Model of the World, James Blaut argues that European colonial ascendancy during the early modern period has often been misconstrued or misrepresented in Euro-American historiography as evidence of a unique and inherent superiority—whether racial, environmental, or cultural—and one that was supposed, moreover, to be permanent.[617] Informed by his critique, this chapter
seeks to document the contingent and interactive nature of events through which a number of early modern empires gradually emerged through the interplay of international competition for trade and state patronage of science that ultimately resulted in the global integration of space. It then further explores the means by which an epistemologically “scientific” outlook rooted in measurement came, by the early nineteenth century, to dominate other forms of knowing in Europe.
The assumed superiority of this model justified the suppression of local knowledge systems and indigenous ways of doing things both at home and abroad, resulting in massive restructuring of what constituted knowledge.State involvement in the determination of how knowledge is constituted and what constitutes truth was by no means unique to European imperial practices. However, the way in which what it meant to be “modern” was redefined and cast as a positive moral value originated within the European political context and sanctified the marriage of science and capital.22 Its invocation as a positive moral value supporting change has, however, long since transcended the “West”; the ability to bring “modernity,” and along with it the (often elusive) promise of economic prosperity, is used as a mantle to legitimize authority and garner support for capital projects throughout the far reaches of the world.
The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections. Because it is not possible to be comprehensive, I have chosen to focus on a number of specific case studies that explore specific aspects of imperial mapping, registering, and ordering. The following section, “The Early Modern Search for Geographic Knowledge,” explores the diverse and shifting mapping practices used within the Italian citystates, imperial Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Romanov Russia, and Ming-Qing China. “Silences on Imperial Maps” draws primarily on examples from British and Portuguese maps. “Standardization of Measures, Triangulation, and Registration” examines practices used by France and Britain. The conclusion serves as a synthetic summary statement that also addresses different ways of knowing.