Government Boundary Mapping Policy and the Knowledge Apparatus of the British State, 1841–1889

Information as a source of central government power has long been a theme in the historiography of the nineteenth century.¹ The subject also has salience for public policy history, a major theme in which is the trend toward centralizing of government power. Since territory is a defining component of the state, how can a state know its territory and its internal delimitation: a vital prerequisite for the precise application of policy? This article examines a particular instance of the extension of state power through control of information in the form of cartographic knowledge. The specific focus is the Ordnance Survey’s survey of administrative boundaries in England and Wales, undertaken between 1841 and 1889 alongside its large-scale mapping survey. This was an era of great change in Britain; industrialization and urbanization continued apace and changes in forms of local administration were seen as necessary to cope with it. Thus the article explores the context in which central government was able to initiate its policy objectives with regard to gaining knowledge of and reshaping the internal boundaries of the local state, and the significance of such a policy.

Although the Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791, this article will concentrate on the mid-nineteenth century period, after it was placed on a statutory footing and began to produce detailed maps, principally for civilian uses. The original military role of the Ordnance Survey clearly involved a motive of strengthening knowledge of the territory in the interests of efficient organization and knowledge of the internal space of the state.² This study concentrates on the mature phase of Ordnance Survey activity when it began to record local administrative areas in reliable and minute detail on large-scale maps.

This article asks how we should characterize the Ordnance Survey’s role in first recording the traditional local administrative boundaries of the United Kingdom and then aiding the articulation of a system of local government with rationalized spatial expression. Where did the Ordnance Survey “sit” between central government and the localities? Did the Boundary Survey (henceforth referred to as the OSBS) serve to further a possible standardizing agenda of central government in the mid- to late nineteenth century? Did the Ordnance Survey’s definitive survey of public boundaries represent an unsympathetic intrusion by central government upon the localities? After all, it might be supposed that mapping is one of the most intrusive forms of information gathering that the state or any other body could undertake. What kind of new administrative geography emerged in the nineteenth century and what was the Ordnance Survey’s role in the process? An integrated system of local government developed, where arguably none had existed before, with many new functions such as poor-law unions, registration, and sanitary districts. All used the framework set by the ancient territorial units as building blocks and thus how much innovation was involved? The case study thus provides an examination of British state policy on the development of its knowledge apparatus through the medium of mapping of local administrative boundaries.

The Ordnance Survey had to decide how carry out the task given by its Whitehall paymasters and set out in legislation of 1841, which established the organization on a statutory footing.³ It is shown that the process was not simply one of top- down imposition, but also involved respect for tradition and local usages as well as reflecting the agenda of the mapmaker. The cartographic arm of central government through this particular extension of its knowledge apparatus laid bare the administrative geography of Britain. However, the distinctiveness and particularism of forms of local administration, especially in terms of their spatial manifestation, was not seriously eroded.

A useful reference point here is Scott, who sees “legibility as a central problem in statecraft.”⁴ While his thesis treats twentieth-century large-scale utopian schemes designed to improve the human condition, some of his findings are instructive in the context of the present article. Scott makes a case against central planning that “excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.”⁵ My argument...