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

Some books create new fields. Some reinterpret supposedly well-understood subjects. Still others expose fresh or previously unconsidered sources and ask what difference it makes to take those sources seriously. S. Max Edelson's The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence intervenes in a thoroughly studied area, how the British empire worked. But Edelson sees the value of a large body of material that nobody has considered as a whole. The result is a breakthrough on several counts.

Edelson's sources are the maps that British cartographers made as the empire reached its Western Hemisphere zenith. The mapmakers worked in a London bureau at the Board of Trade and on the spot, from maritime Canada to the West Indies. Despite the subject, no maps appear in Edelson's book; instead, he presents a very large number of them in an interactive database at Mapscholar.org/empire, which is open to both scholarly and classroom use. His mapmakers created their charts for many reasons, including navigation, war, reorganizing the vast territory that France surrendered in 1763, working out boundaries with Indian country, and establishing plantation regimes in Florida and the Caribbean. Edelson exposes an imperial vision of knowledge and control that informed their work.

Within Britain's large vision, specific problems varied. Both Cape Breton and St. Vincent had been French islands, but making them British presented entirely different problems, so they appear in different chapters. The map-makers probably knew nothing of one another. Their tasks emanated from policy needs in London, and their work often culminated in vast, highly decorated, and richly detailed maps for the great, the good, and the powerful, including King George III. Many of the mapmakers were army and navy officers, and their work provided a basis for such men's conduct during the War of Independence.

Edelson concentrates on the period between George Washington's provoking one imperial war in 1754 near Fort Duquesne and the outbreak of another such war twenty-one years later in eastern Massachusetts, but he knows better than to restrict himself in either geographical or temporal terms. The author thus shows how Henry Popple's enormous, detailed, but highly inaccurate A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto (1733) came into being. In the chapter "Marking the Indian Boundary," Edelson includes Native cartography, both ephemeral travel maps that made their way into European knowledge and the deerskin conceptual map that the Catawbas presented to the governor of South Carolina in the early 1720s. Indigenous knowledge mattered at the time, and it still matters if we really are to understand colonized America.

Edelson takes late imperial British policy making beyond the well-studied East Coast colonies and debates in Parliament about taxing white colonists. Officials understood that their empire included emerging plantation zones on conquered Caribbean islands and in Florida, where spreading slavery became an overt British goal. They realized that indigenous people took part in how the empire worked. The maps that officials drew in order to declare and enforce a boundary between settlement country and Indian country after the Seven Years' War emerged over the heads of colonial officials, speculators, and would-be settlers. They came from direct negotiations between Native people and the Crown's superintendents of Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson in the North and John Stuart in the South.

Part of Edelson's achievement is contributing to our understanding of the American Revolution's profound ambiguity. Those who took over and tried to understand the Leeward Islands and Tobago saw that slavery was on the brink of bursting into a problem that had to be faced. Showing how the mapmakers planned plantation slavery's expansion gets at one dimension of the not-at-all-peculiar institution's centrality to the whole colonial enterprise. Edelson...