Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (review)

“If historians are spatially illiterate and geographically ignorant, this will seriously affect their knowledge and understanding of the past” (241). With this challenge, Black makes clear the importance that he attaches to the spatial dimension of history. This is not a book, however, that portrays geography as the handmaiden of historians, but rather looks at the complex history of attempts to understand the spatial dimension of the past.

Black traces the development of the historical atlas, from its earliest manifestation in Abraham Ortelius’ Parergon (1579) through to CD-ROM packages of the 1990s. The first historical atlases concentrated on the geography of the Bible and of classical Greece and Rome, relying largely on literary accounts and, increasingly in the eighteenth century, on archeological findings. The modern historical atlas developed during the nineteenth century, mapping military campaigns and territorial expansions. By the end of the century, historical atlases began to argue that environmental constraints determined historical outcomes. At the same time, social Darwinism and imperialism increasingly stressed the growth of empires and the power and superiority of individual European nations. After World War II, historical atlases began to reflect the changing emphasis of the historical profession, stressing social and economic history over military and political. Gradually, issues of Eurocentrism and decolonization, as well as an attempt to map the histories of peoples without written records, transformed historical atlases. According to Black, the transformation was complete once computer technology, supported by the GIS (Geographical Information Systems), began to allow for an almost limitless series of permutations of data and mapping possibilities.

Maps and History is in many ways an encyclopedic tour de force. Black has examined and described hundreds of historical atlases from all continents. He shows, for the first time, the trends in this interdisciplinary genre and raises many interesting questions concerning the relationship between historical mapping and archeology, commercial and technological concerns, politics and ideology, and the changing fashion of historical study.

That many of these questions are posed but not explored is not surprising in such a sweeping study, but the interpretations are far overshadowed by the descriptions. One atlas follows another, with detailed descriptions often taking the place of investigations of the intricate connections between the maps and their social construction. The interpretations that Black does make do not delve as deeply as one might wish. For example, he claims that Nazi and communist countries produced atlases marred by ideology, whereas the West strove to eliminate such biases. Communist China produced atlases aimed at proving the territorial extent of historical China, whereas atlases produced in Taiwan were more objective, since “Communist historiography and ideology play no role” (194).

Black is clearly suspicious of a number of methodologies that have entered historical disciplines in recent years, most particularly postmodernism and the social construction of knowledge. He believes that historical atlases have improved as they have tried to incorporate more social and cultural issues, although he acknowledges that sometimes this effort has not been entirely successful. For example, issues of gender have not often been mapped, Black points out. He also discusses the difficulty in mapping non-Western preliterary cultures, especially when their ways of conceptualizing space were not the same as that reified by the modern Western map.

These observations lead to the question of whether the problem in mapping that most concerns historians and other postmodern critics today arises from the fact that maps are an ideologically driven tool and that we may need to give them up (or change them fundamentally) in order to address some of these concerns. The most intriguing message of Black’s book lies in what he does not say. He provides a gold mine of data with which to investigate the socially constructed nature of maps, more clear in historical maps than their modern counterparts, but he is reluctant to proceed down this path.