The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (review)

This beautifully illustrated collection of essays critically examines the historical relationship between imperialism and cartography. The volume allows for a comparative understanding of imperial representations of space by considering early modern Russian, Chinese, and Iberian colonial designs, along with lesser-known aspects of imperial endeavors by the United States and Western Europe. The Imperial Map questions assumptions about what an empire “looks like” by eschewing familiar Eurocentric visions, uncovering the agency of mapmakers and map readers, and expanding the limits of our cartographical thinking beyond maps.

If maps can help to reveal the ideological underpinnings of empires, differences in cartographical language may suggest alternate approaches to empire building. Valerie Kivelson’s examination of seventeenth-century tsarist Russian maps of Siberia and Laura Hostetler’s survey of maps produced under the Qing dynasty suggest that not all empires silenced alternative and subordinate cultural understandings of space. Whereas British and Spanish maps sought either to render natives invisible or to celebrate the conversion of indigenous populations, Muscovite representations explicitly highlighted Siberia’s complex ethnic and religious makeups, because, as Kivelson argues, “Russian status was elevated rather than threatened by the heterogeneity of the subject population” (87). Hostetler demonstrates how the Qing strategically commissioned maps in different cartographical styles that appealed to diverse cultural sensibilities. While the European-influenced Kangxi surveys of the early eighteenth century justified claims to an international audience, domestically, the Qing cultivated its legitimacy over a growing territorial expanse by producing images that were based on long-standing indigenous Chinese mapping methods.

The volume highlights recent trends in the history of cartography by turning attention to readers and makers of maps as problematical agents of empire. For instance, Matthew Edney’s interrogation of the seemingly natural category of “the imperial map” cautions against differentiating maps of colonies from those of national places if they were drawn in the same cartographical mode. Instead, Edney emphasizes the ways in which individuals constructed subjective self-images (be they national, colonized, and/or colonizing) through the making and reading of maps. A map therefore could just as easily serve the purposes of empire as it could those of anti-imperial politics. Much like map readers, mapmakers had agendas of their own. D. Graham Burnett’s examination of the United States Exploring Expedition reveals how hydrographical charts of Pacific islands produced—and were produced through—the disciplining and coercion of the expedition’s crew as well as island natives. As the dramatic courtroom proceedings that open and close the chapter demonstrate, cartographical inaccuracies were employed as evidence of insubordination during navy court-martial trials. Burnett’s study also reminds us that American imperial pretensions in the Pacific started long before 1898. Complementing Edney’s attention to the perspective of the colonized, Burnett shifts his focus to that of the colonizers, namely, the foot soldiers of early nineteenth-century U.S. imperial cartographical expeditions.

Two essays fruitfully examine how changes in mapping technologies, broadly speaking, may have informed how audiences in the heart of empire viewed colonial places. Michael Heffernan comparatively analyzes French and British newspaper maps during the height of these countries’ imperial designs from 1875 to 1925. He demonstrates how the expansion of empire abroad stimulated consumer interest in printed maps at home, driving a new kind of printing technology and visual culture. Neil Safier calls attention to the importance of “repositories of spatial knowledge” other than maps, examining the documentation produced by eighteenth-century Iberian boundary-making expeditions in the Amazonia. The charts, epic poems, drawings, and ethnographical reports of Amerindian spatial thinking that appear in Enlightenment scientists’ writings reveal how people tried to make sense of peripheral territories “on the ground.” They also suggest how readers of this material might have colonized Amazonian territories and peoples in their own minds, however unstable European presence was in these loosely held territories.

As Akerman’s introduction rightly points out, no single analytical framework adequately encompasses the nuanced approaches employed by...