Standardization of Measures, Triangulation, and Registration

In the transition from early modern to modern mapping, changes born of standard­ization in cartographic style are seen not only in mapping of territories abroad, but also in emergent national cartographies.

The cartographic integration of France took some time and was closely linked to standardization of other forms of measure.^[653] Measurement is always about power. The fundamental question is who has the authority to impose their standard, for a profit is always to be made by “tipping the scale,” or selling someone “short.” When local or regional authorities demanded payment of taxes and peasants felt that the measures used to calculate their share were unfair, to whom could they turn for protection? By the eighteenth century they turned as a group to the Estates General, including a petition for the standardization of weights and measures, along with other grievances, expressing “a most sincere desire for but one king, one law, one weight, and one measure.”^[654] They saw standardization as a means of protection of their own interests, guaranteeing fairness in local transactions including the collec­tion of taxes.^[655]

Even as the Third Estate was feeling the need for standardization of weights and measures, the crown began to feel the need for standardization of distances and map uniformity in cartographic representation of the realm.

In France we see how scaled mapping served to help integrate the nation. If commoners had looked to a higher authority for standardization of weights, meas­ures, and even laws, it was ultimately found not in the person of the king, but in the adoption of standardization born of science and rationality. In fact, the resulting national integration was so effective that the person of the king was no longer needed to serve the purpose. A similar faith in science was emerging also in Britain, facilitating the joint task of bringing French and British time and space into the same system, which was accomplished by linking the measurements taken by the Paris and Greenwich observatories into “one homogeneous space,” or we might say into one and the same scientific network, in 1787.^[658]

British geographical interests were also international, and became increasingly imperial in nature.

James Rennell's map of Bengal and Bihar (1776) was made to impress audiences at home with the company's worthiness as a sponsor of scientific endeavors, to pro­ject the company's legitimacy through analogy with the established British model of the landlord, and for the maps' potential utility in the colonization project it­self.^[659] The endeavor to map all of India “accurately” by using the technology of tri­angulation both employed Indian surveyors eager to be part ofa modern scientific project, and encountered resistance from local people who feared what the tech­nology might bring and found the surveys invasive.^[660] As in earlier British efforts to map the New World, native informants and other systems of cartographic knowledge were heavily relied on, but not credited or directly reflected in the resulting maps.

As Christopher Bayly has recognized and articulated, one of the great challenges for British rule in India was the dual nature of knowledge that they relied on to govern. Whether in map or census form, information came largely from na­tive informants but was translated into categories of legibility that the East India Company, and later the British state, could recognize and record.

Although emerging over a fairly short period of time, differences in British and Indian systems of information gathering were significant and a cause for much distrust. The colonial assumption in the nineteenth century appears to have been that British agencies would operate according to “British” (i.e., “modern, scien­tific”) logics and Indian agencies would operate according to local (“unscien­tific,” and presumably unchanging) models. But of course, without an interface between these agencies and their forms of knowing, there would be no point to their existence, no communication, and ultimately no political power. As Bayly describes it, “The meeting between British and Indian agencies was riven by sus­picion, distortion and violence.

Such a monopoly was, however, impossible because of the need for Indian col­laboration. Furthermore, attitudes that connected certain knowledge positions with Britishness and with intellectual superiority were based entirely on hubris, as revealed along with the system's vulnerability, for “knowledgeable Indians which used the colonial state's communications and ideologies independently of it, or against it, began to emerge even in the early nineteenth century.”^[666] The British re­sponse circa 1800 was to introduce a variety of laws to limit opportunities for career advancement and social mixing on the part of Indians as well as mixed-race chil­dren of British officers in an attempt to exploit race in order to fix and to perpetuate British superiority. As a result, the power divide became increasingly enacted along racial lines.