The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (review)

This volume is a celebration of the intellectual impact of the late historian of cartography John Brian Harley, presented through a thoroughly annotated republication of seven of his later essays and a comprehensive bibliography of his writings, along with a useful introduction written by a former colleague. The title is that of the book Harley proposed to write next in 1991. Instead he died later that same year, at the age of fifty-nine. In lieu of his final treatise, his friends have assembled his most seminal essays from a variety of disparate publications; half of the papers were first published from 1988 through 1990, and the rest were published posthumously. Although every essay in the present volume is at least ten years old, the title is apt. The "new nature" of maps reflects the sea change in the discipline of the history of cartography that has occurred, to a remarkable degree instigated by Brian Harley.

Harley was one of those rare scholars who turned quite radical at the height of his career rather than at the beginning or the melancholy end. Born in Britain in 1932, by the time he completed his Ph.D. in 1960 at the University of Birmingham he had established himself as an authority on the historical geography of England and its mapmakers and mapping institutions, particularly the Ordnance Survey. Later, his attention shifted westward to the mapping of the Americas, and he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where, in 1979, he cofounded, with David Woodward, the mighty project called The History of Cartography, published by the University of Chicago Press. From that position at the apex of the discipline, rather than its margins, Harley's attention turned increasingly to the philosophy and meaning of maps, and in particular to their social nature. By the time he was done he had driven a wedge between reality and cartographic representation that survives as his greatest legacy.

It is not so much just that the discipline of cartographic history had been, pre-Harley, largely "empiricist," although he often used that term to describe traditional approaches. The history of cartography began in antiquarian scholarship in a nineteenth century awash in old maps stripped of context and provenance. The major concerns of the early discipline were, first, authenticity—in the sense of publication histories and copies and fakes, rather than fidelity to "reality"—and, second, value, closely attendant upon authenticity and printing quality and rareness, and expressed in candidly monetary terms. Although the discipline later added an emphasis on the technical aspects of map design, compilation, and publishing, from the nature of its early emphases it was ill equipped to evaluate both the meaning of maps in social context and the fidelity, or the lack thereof, between what maps displayed and geographic reality "out there."

Harley undermined empiricist cartographic history on two fronts, the first of which was the social context of mapmaking and map using. In works such as his 1988 essay on "Maps, Knowledge, and Power" he emphasized the major roles that maps and mapmaking have played in European and other nationalist and imperialist expansions, not just as instruments of state control but as aids to the very conceptualization of the state itself. As the legitimization of one state or people often requires denial of another, Harley drew attention to the critical concept of "silences," the social influences exerted through what (and whom) the map omits as well as what it includes and emphasizes.

On a second front, Harley attacked the cultural preconceptions of map use inherent, although largely unspoken, in traditional cartographic scholarship. As research on The History of Cartography expanded to embrace non-Western cartographies during the 1980s, Harley argued not just that the very definition of maps and what separated them from nonmaps was culturally determined, but also that the...