The significance of early coastal maps, from the 16th to the 20th century, as a crucial repository of geomorphological and archaeological data is increasingly being recognised, and their integration ...in scientific research is becoming more critical. Before using early maps as a means of exploring historical information, it is imperative to examine their historical context and investigate inquiries such as: How was the coastline of a particular region perceived and mapped since ancient times? When did the rigorous and most accurate mapping of that coast begin? Who were the pioneer and prime historical cartographers who surveyed and mapped that region? Which country did they belong to? How did cartographic techniques evolve in historical times? The present paper addresses these questions in the context of the Indian coast and identifies some of the important cartographers and their atlases. The information provided also sheds light on the efforts made by Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and Danish cartographers to map the Indian coastline, with a particular focus on areas where they had significant interests. The paper serves as a helpful reference for conducting archival work on historical textual and cartographic records of coastal India.
Based on indigenous maps collected in British Burma by James George Scott (1851–1935) and kept at the Cambridge University Library, this paper offers an alternative history of the first years of ...British colonisation in Upper Burma in the 1880s and 1890s. The entangled scripts – Chinese characters, Shan, Burmese and English – as well as the materiality and the visual codes of these documents bring into view forms of contact that did not last long. Contextualising these maps with other kinds of sources – including Scott’s diaries and administrative reports – allows us to reconstruct their production as part of processes of intelligence gathering and frontier settlement. By tracing the more or less willing role of Burmese clerks, notables, guides and interpreters in the cartographic processes implemented by the English on the ground, we can reintroduce these actors into a history of cartography that has long been Eurocentric. Doing so reveals how the British had to rely on indigenous knowledge to control a territory quite unknown to them during the early years of colonisation.
•Traces the constitution of the Scott collection in the late nineteenth century.•Considers looted or commissioned Burmese and Shan maps in the early colonial period.•Explores the colonial encounter in British Burma through indigenous mapping.•Investigates intelligence gathering and frontier settlement as situations of encounter.•Demonstrates how degrees of commensurability were achieved through indigenous mapping.
An appreciation for old maps as culturally important documents came slowly in the United States. The first precondition for this shift was the reframing of history brought by political independence. ...The second was the growth of facsimile maps, which made these sources available to a wider audience. The third was a loose network of scholars, archivists, collectors, and federal actors-including Johann Georg Kohl-who gradually began to advocate for the cultural and political significance of old maps. Yet ongoing advocacy for a federal map collection did not produce results until the end of the Civil War, just as the trade in old maps coincided with the emergence of university-based historical and geographical research. The rapid growth of institutional map collections-including the Library of Congress Division of Maps-by the turn of the twentieth century bears out this shift. The idea that outdated maps might be valuable evidence of history and culture could only develop once maps were understood not simply as instruments of accuracy, but meaningful artifacts of history. Here we trace this complex story across multiple areas of American life from the early nineteenth century to the interwar period.
Theorists within and beyond the discipline of geography increasingly realize that boundaries are not simply lines that enclose and define territories. Boundaries also regulate and are reproduced by ...acts of movement. Movement, beyond and across, as well as within a bounded territory, serves to reproduce the territory that is being bounded. It follows that to understand the history of a territorial entity one must go beyond tracing the spatially fixed activities that occur within that territory or the discursive strategies through which the territory is made to appear natural. One must also trace the acts of movement that occur within, across, and outside the territory's boundaries and the designation of specific spaces of movement as beyond territorial control. In short, one cannot understand the construction of "inside" space as a series of territories of fixity, society, modernization, and development without simultaneously understanding the construction of "outside" space as an arena of mobility that is deemed unsuitable for territorial control. In this article, this perspective is applied to the preeminent normative territory of modernity-the sovereign state-and attention is directed specifically to the designation of the world-ocean as a space of mobility outside the boundaries of the state-society units that purportedly constitute the modern world. Through an analysis of representations of marine space on 591 world maps printed in Europe and the Americas between 1501 and 1800, this article traces the construction of the ocean as an external space of mobility, antithetical to the norm of the territorial state that also was emerging during this era.
Abstract
Of all the technical and scientific developments that made possible the European maritime expansion, the nautical chart is perhaps the least studied and understood. This fact is very ...surprising as it was with the information contained in those charts, and later imported to geographical maps and atlases, that the newly discovered lands were first shown to the European nations. There was, however, a deep incompatibility between these two cartographic paradigms-the nautical charts and the geographical maps-which remained unsolved throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, despite the attempts to harmonize the technical principles of Ptolemy's Geography with the advances of nautical cartography. An eloquent symptom of such incompatibility was the difference between what was understood as an accurate depiction of the Earth, in the eyes of cosmographers and geographers, and what was considered by the pilots as an accurate nautical chart. The misunderstandings around these issues during the early modern period and the unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation were, in great part, the cause for some polemics among cosmographers, cartographers and pilots, such as the conflict in the Casa de Contratación around the charts of Diego Gutiérrez, a fact not entirely understood by historians. At the core of the difficulty lies the circumstance that only in the present day has the true nature of the nautical chart, as a navigational tool, started to be clarified. How the differences between geographical maps and nautical charts contributed to shape the History of Cartography in various periods, and how they are related to conflicting scholarly objectives and practices, is the subject of this essay. We will show, using the results of cartometric analysis, that not only were those artifacts constructed using different principles and with different purposes, but that they belonged to incompatible cartographic paradigms, and we will argue for the relevance of this fact for the history of science.
After fifty years, we are revisiting R.A. Skelton's 1966 study of the collecting of early maps in Europe and the United States for the celebration of the Nineteenth Nebenzahl lecture series at the ...Newberry Library, Chicago. In that study, Skelton discussed who collected maps, where some of those maps have been and where they are today, what it meant to assemble map collections, and how we understood and studied maps and mapping fifty years ago. Skelton, however, examined primarily the collecting of European and American mapping during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. This study will address one neglected area of collecting and studying, that of the maps of East Asia, i.e. those of China, Korea and Japan in Europe and the United States exclusively, with the understanding that the majority of extant maps of East Asia are currently housed in respective national, provincial, municipal and university libraries and museums in East Asia. And only pre-modern East Asian maps, those produced in East Asia for an East Asian audience prior to 1900 are discussed, as that generally represents the historical moment when transitions from imperial and royal rule to modern nation-state governance occurred in East Asia.
Curiosity about imaginary thematic maps described in The Consolidator, Daniel Defoe's 1705 satirical fantasy about a trip to the Moon, inspired research into the early modern English public's ...knowledge of maps. The Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Books Online (ECCO) databases of digitized early modern literature were employed. A full-text EEBO search of 1600-1700 found the word 'map' and its variants in 3382 records. A similar search in ECCO of 1701-1710 yielded results in 1425 records. About half of the results are printed map illustrations and mentions of actual maps, while the remainder are map metaphors in sermons, poems, plays, etc. The metaphors can be classified using Oxford English Dictionary definitions of 'map'. This literary use of map metaphors arguably prepared the public to accept maps as tools for the visualization of invisible or intangible physical and cultural phenomena, when thematic maps began to develop in the mid-eighteenth century.
Drawing on a number of detailed historical case studies and visual analyses of many moon images, this work proposes an innovative understanding of the development of lunar cartography, and offers new ...insights on theoretical debates surrounding the nature of maps in general.
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