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

S. Max Edelson's latest book is at once a history of the major cartographic undertakings of the post–Seven Years' War British Empire and an institutional history of the Board of Trade in the years leading up to the American Revolution. The incorporation of many maps and visions into the singular New Map of Empire is also indicative of Edelson's central claim: that the maps produced in the wake of the 1763 Treaty of Paris were part of a coherent project directed by the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, one that sought to knit together distant colonial territories into a unified Atlantic Empire governed under a shared vision of spatial order directed from the imperial center. This, then, is more than just a deeply researched and exciting new contribution to the history of cartography. It is, as Edelson explains, an imperial history that takes maps as its analytic focus "because they enabled British officials to see distant lands in high resolution … a capacity that emboldened them to take command of new colonial territory directly from London in new ways—and with new purpose" (7). As much as they were projections of imperial ambition, these maps also revealed a specific imperial logic.

In the wake of seismic territorial shifts agreed to by European powers in 1763, the British Empire swelled in size. Claiming key former French and Spanish possessions as well as regions of previous legal ambiguity, British North America suddenly stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, joined too by the empire's flecks of Caribbean islands. Though British statesmen and cartographers had long relied on French and Spanish renderings of North American space, the newly emboldened board aimed to create systematic surveys of Britain's continental possessions. Edelson organizes his book chapters into three distinct sections, reflecting the different scales of resolution the board envisioned as its possibilities for projecting its imperial logic developed. The first two chapters take a wide perspective, covering efforts by imperial ministers and military officials to map, order, and control North American territory before and during the Seven Years' War. The next four chapters are structured by region, as Edelson zooms in and pans between four major areas of cartographic fervor after 1763: the Maritime Northeast, the American Interior, the Caribbean, and East Florida. In his final chapter and conclusion, Edelson pulls the lens back again to examine how cartographic representations of these spaces were compiled in London and stitched together in the new atlases of the British Empire in North America.

Edelson's monograph is supplemented by an interactive website that contains seven digital atlases that each correspond to a book chapter and uses the MapScholar umbrella, a geospatial visualization platform that Edelson developed along with Bill Ferster at the University of Virginia's Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Network of Technological Initiatives (SHANTI).¹ The site brings together all 257 maps Edelson examined at various archives, a curated collection that reconstructs and mimics the centralized project undertaken by the mid-eighteenth-century British state. Edelson implores us to read the book alongside the site so that as the book travels across space we can follow along. On MapScholar, the map images are not simply identified but also rubber sheeted over present-day satellite projections. Thus MapScholar not only is invaluable for readers but also stands alone as a digital resource, an inspiring example of what digital companions can bring to scholarship.

Though The New Map of Empire is immersed in the renewed scholarly interest in historical geography and the turn toward spatial history, it also joins the growing body of work on communication networks; at its core, this is a history of information, data, and knowledge production. But the book also reflects the revival of institutional and political history, for it argues that the study of the movement of data...