The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence by S. Max Edelson (review)

Today, finding directions to a desired site is as easy as opening an app on one's phone and punching in an address. Gone are the days of poring over a roadmap searching for a route or indiscernible interstate number. Yet, maps were—and are—valuable for more than their directional information. As S. Max Edelson argues in The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence, maps offer a vision of the world at a particular place and time from a certain point of view. In his new book, Edelson illustrates how following the Seven Years' War Great Britain, and more specifically its Board of Trade, utilized maps to put forward a plan for the empire; one it hoped would bring the American colonies under greater control while funneling the commerce and profits from these American possessions toward the building of an even greater British domain.

Edelson contends the Board of Trade in London sought to reconfigure the way American territory was colonized. He notes that rather than relying on American colonists, whom the board believed were self-serving wealth seekers—and uninterested in what was best for the empire at large—the board planned to strategically settle new lands gained through the 1763 Treaty of Paris. The first step in this process was actually understanding what these territories entailed, including geographic features, current inhabitants, potential for crops, and access to rivers and trade networks, among other attributes. The board was not entirely familiar with the interior of North America, Edelson posits, thus maps were an essential component of its plan to bring order to a chaotic colonial system.

Surveyors traversed the Western Hemisphere from the Caribbean Islands to Canada, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean, attempting to create maps that would allow the board to visualize these far-off territories. As Edelson reasons, by seeing visual representations of these places, the board hoped it could more efficiently regulate and control its possessions from its London offices. These cartographic art pieces also justified the cost of the war to a skeptical public, which could now see the gains Britain had made exemplified in vivid color and detail.

Yet these maps were not perfect. Edelson explains how maps are "cultural as well as empirical objects," drafted by people who had specific purposes and plans (4). Each map the board commissioned is part of a larger puzzle that Edelson skillfully traces and examines. Scale and space are two aspects that

Edelson asserts change over time and affect the ways maps are received and perceived. Colonists and Native Americans with first-hand knowledge of local geography, for example, might perceive a tract of land or a bend in a river with different eyes than a politician in England hoping to draw a new boundary line. Land that appears flat and fertile on a map may in fact be rocky, rugged, and unfit for planting. These misconceptions and miscommunications plagued the board in its efforts to consolidate and control these newly acquired territories.

The New Map of Empire investigates the rise and role of mapping in five zones: the Gulf Coast, Maritime New England, the Trans-Appalachian Interior, Peninsular Florida, and the Southeast Caribbean. Each zone presents problems particular to its region. In New England and Canada, Edelson claims, Britain found it difficult to hold territories where colonists refused to settle permanently; whereas in the Caribbean islands, settlement attempts hit a wall due to conflicts with the Native population. Eastern Florida, meanwhile, presented a dilemma over its actual topography and the feasibility of settling there.

Perhaps most interesting is Edelson's claim that the territorial line the Proclamation of 1763 drew down the Appalachian Mountains, separating Natives on the western side from colonists on the eastern side, was actually three lines. Edelson convincingly argues that while the proclamation was the legal affirmation of the board's line...