A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  The Cassini surveys represented the beginnings of a new way of mapping a country, but its inhabitants needed an emotional attachment and political loyalty to something more than a geometrical triangle. Religion no longer provided the answer. Where Christ once presided over the map, looking downwards onto the world, the Cassini maps offered a horizontal perspective of the earth, from which every metre of territory (and by implication each of its inhabitants) had the same value. Political absolutism was also unsustainable. Despite its initial attempts to establish a way of mapping that could police and control the dynastic realm, the monarchy supported the map of a kingdom which unintentionally metamorphosed into the map of a nation.

  Embedded in each and every one of its 182 sheets, the message of the Carte de Cassini would be easily appropriated by subsequent generations of national ideologues: one map, one language and one people, all sharing a common set of customs, beliefs and traditions. The Carte de Cassini presented its subjects with an image of a nation that was worth fighting for, and even dying for, in the endlessly repeated act of national self-sacrifice. It seemed a noble enough cause at the time, but the more intemperate consequences of such unwavering nationalism would be felt not only throughout France in the 1790s.

  10

  Geopolitics

  Halford Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, 1904

  London, May 1831

  On the evening of 24 May 1831, a group of forty gentlemen met for dinner at the Thatched House tavern in the St James’s area of central London. They were all experienced travellers and explorers, united by their membership of one of London’s growing number of private dining societies: the Raleigh Travellers Club, named after the great Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. The club had been founded in 1826 by the traveller Sir Arthur de Capell Brooke and met every fortnight, when each member took it in turns to provide a lavish banquet and impart tales of travel and adventure. On this particular evening, the club’s dinner-card announced it had slightly different business. At a meeting chaired by Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty and himself a renowned traveller and statesman in China and South Africa, the club’s members ‘submitted that, among the numerous literary and scientific societies established in the British metropolis, one was still wanting to complete the circle of scientific institutions, whose sole object should be the promotion and diffusion of that most important and entertaining branch of knowledge, GEOGRAPHY’. It proposed that ‘a new and useful Society might therefore be formed, under the name of THE GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON’.1

  The club’s members believed that the advantages of such a society would be ‘of the first importance to mankind in general, and paramount to the welfare of a maritime nation like Great Britain with its numerous and extensive foreign possessions’. It was therefore proposed that the new society would ‘collect, register and digest’ all the ‘new, interesting, and useful facts and discoveries’, ‘accumulate gradually a library of the best books on geography’, including ‘a complete collection of maps and charts, from the earliest period of rude geographical delineations to the most improved of the present time’, ‘procure specimens’, ‘prepare brief instructions for such as are setting out on their travels’, and ‘open a communication with all those philosophical and literary societies with which geography is connected’.2

  News of the society was warmly received in the press: in November 1831 the Quarterly Review thought ‘that such a society should never have been thought of till about a twelvemonth ago is somewhat surprising, in a great country like this, which throws out its numerous and comprehensive arms into every corner of the globe, – and the more so, since almost every capital in Europe had long had its Geographical Society’. It was pleased to report that ‘His Majesty [King William IV], always ready to sanction by his patronage and liberality whatever undertakings may hold out a promise of being beneficial to the public, has not only lent the use of his royal name, but contributed to the society an annual donation of fifty guineas, as a premium for the encouragement of geographical knowledge’.3

  The 1820s and 1830s marked a turning point in the history of geography and of mapmaking. The effectiveness of the Cassini surveys for military and legal administration, as well as the spirit of national identity it had done so much to foster, led European statesmen to appreciate the value of cultivating geography as a serious intellectual and practical endeavour. The commercial world grasped the value of maps quicker than the state. Agricultural and industrial growth dramatically increased the demand for established maps, and also created new ones: estate plans, tithe maps, enclosure plans, transport maps of the new canal and railway systems, town and parish plans all flourished.4 The grand, cosmopolitan mapmaking of individuals like Ribeiro and Mercator was no longer able to collate the data required to produce such maps, which required a level of institutionalization that would enable the pooling of manpower and resources on an unprecedented scale. One consequence was the creation in the first half of the nineteenth century of several learned geographical societies that bridged both state and commercial interests in geography, providing institutional support for the study and practice of mapmaking. In 1821 the French founded the Société de Géographie; in Germany, Karl Ritter (1779–1859) created the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Berlin Geographical Society) in 1828, and, rather belatedly, in 1831 the English launched their own Royal Geographical Society. The result was an unprecedented professionalization and politicization of maps. From the late eighteenth century, relations between the state and the mapmaker became closer than ever, as the state began to exploit the administrative power of maps, and the mapmakers saw the opportunity for increasing their professional and intellectual status. The Cassini surveys had shaped an image of a modern European nation, but the nation state now sought to invent mapping traditions that served its particular political interests.

  As the perception of what maps could achieve began to change, so did their appearance, thanks to a momentous technological development: lithography. In 1796 the German engraver Alois Senefelder stumbled upon a new method of duplicating graphic images. He realized that he could draw an image using a wax crayon on a piece of limestone, and that the application of water would allow ink to adhere to the wax outline, but not the porous stone. It was a process which, once modified, transformed the mass production of graphic images.5 Until the discovery of lithography, copperplate engraving was a skilled, protracted and extremely expensive technique, but one which had dominated mapmaking since the early sixteenth century. It relied on the expertise of the engraver as much as the knowledge of the cartographer, and required a laborious physical transfer from the engraved plate to printed paper. Lithography was completely different. The chemical elements of its process required very little skilled labour. It also allowed geographers to submit a ‘right-reading’ image which could be quickly reproduced, rather than using copperplate engravings, which required an inverted image (known as ‘wrong-reading’) to be created first. This gave virtually anyone the ability to print a map. It was a relatively inexpensive process, which Senefelder claimed was three times faster than engraving. As it developed throughout the nineteenth century, lithography also allowed mapmakers to incorporate colour and photography into their maps. Although many institutions (including the Ordnance Survey) initially remained loyal to established engraving techniques, by the beginning of the twentieth century, in terms of the sheer volume of published maps, lithography had eclipsed the earlier technique.6

  Not since the fifteenth century had there been such an innovation in the making of maps. At a conceptual level, it also inspired a shift in geography and mapmaking’s place within it. The grand cosmographies of Janssonius and Blaeu had already questioned the validity of the cosmographer’s task, but the impact of first Copernicanism and then Darwinism fatally compromised the traditional conception of cosmography as comprehending a universal image in a series of maps. As cosmography continued it
s decline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so a new conception began to circulate that replaced it, and in the process offered a clearer description of the science of mapmaking: cartography. Karl Ritter, founder of the Berlin Geographical Society, first used the term ‘Kartograph’ in a paper written in 1828. Just a year later the French Société de Géographie began using the word ‘cartographique’. In 1839 the Portuguese historian and politician Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa, viscount of Santarém, claimed to have coined the term in using the word ‘cartographia’. Sir Richard Burton was the first Englishman to adopt it in 1859, on an RGS-sponsored expedition to explore the lakes of central Africa; ‘cartographer’ followed in 1863, and by the 1880s both words were firmly established in the lexicon.7

  The rise of cartography gave the subjective act of mapmaking a degree of scientific expertise which enabled both its practitioners and political beneficiaries to represent it as a coherent discipline from which all geographical knowledge developed. It was increasingly regarded as an objective, empirical and scientifically verifiable field of study, separate from the extraneous disciplines of cosmography, navigation, surveying and astronomy with which it had been associated (and often subsumed by) for so many centuries.8

  Fig. 29 Diagrams of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century map projections.

  The idea was compelling, and it generated even greater advances within mapmaking. Developments in pure and applied mathematics inspired interest in map projections that went even further than the innovations of the sixteenth century. Between 1800 and 1899 an estimated fifty-three new map projections were proposed, more than three times the number developed throughout the eighteenth century. Mercator’s projection, and the associated presumptions about projecting the globe onto a plane surface, was repeatedly challenged by a bewildering array of new mathematical projections which also responded to the need for medium- and small-scale maps to represent the increase in knowledge of the physical world. The combined study of calculus and geometry allowed mathematicians to propose increasingly complex projections that moved beyond the classical models of using cylinders and rectangles to project the globe onto a piece of paper. Many of these new projections were proposed by amateurs motivated by a desire for self-promotion, but others were supported by geographical organizations and states eager to utilize the political and commercial insights provided by mapmaking. Those that endured included the Bonne projection, named after the French cartographer Rigobert Bonne (1727–95), a pseudo-conic projection used in topographic maps, the azimuthal perspective projection invented by Philippe de la Hire (1640–1718), which was used in hemispheric maps, and the polyconic projection created by Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (1770–1843), the Swiss-born head of the United States’s Survey of the Coast, whose projection used a series of nonconcentric standard parallels to reduce distortion, and which was so successful that it replaced the Mercator projection on official US topographic maps and coastal charts in the nineteenth century. One of the most prominent innovations came in 1805, when the German mathematician and astronomer Karl Brandan Mollweide (1774–1825) turned his back on Mercator’s cylindrical projection to create a world map calculated to represent the depiction of area rather than angular fidelity. It became known as a pseudo-cylindrical equal-area projection, showing an oval earth with curved meridians and straight parallels.

  These projections involved mathematicians and surveyors rethinking the possibilities and limits of mapmaking. In the 1820s the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss began work on a geodesic survey of Hanover. While investigating the problem of measuring the curvature of the earth’s surface, Gauss produced theorems on differential geometry, in which he argued that it was impossible to map the terrestrial globe onto a plane surface without serious distortion. He attempted to revise Mercator’s projection, inventing the term ‘conformality’ (from the Latin conformalis, meaning to have the same shape), basing his new projections on correct shape around a particular point. Despite these and numerous other projections, there was no international geographical organization with the authority to adopt a standard geographical projection. Although most nineteenth-century atlases still used Mercator’s projection on their world maps, their hemispherical and continental maps still drew from a variety of more than a dozen available projections.9

  The consequence of all these changes was the emergence of a new genre, thematic mapping. A thematic map portrays the geographical nature of a variety of physical, and social, phenomena, and depicts the spatial distribution and variation of a chosen subject or theme which is usually invisible, such as crime, disease or poverty.10 Although used as early as the 1680s in meteorological charts drawn by Edmund Halley, thematic maps developed rapidly from the early 1800s with the growth in quantitative statistical methods and public censuses. The development of probability theory and the ability to regulate error in statistical analysis allowed the social sciences to compile vast amounts of data, including national censuses. In 1801 France and England conducted censuses to measure and classify their populations. By the 1830s the Flemish astronomer Adolphe Quételet developed the statistical concept of the ‘average man’, inspiring ‘moral’ thematic maps measuring educational, medical, criminal and racial distributions.11

  As well as contributing to the development of the social sciences, thematic maps also allowed the natural sciences to classify and represent data in a completely new way. Biology, economics and geology all exploited the new method to map the earth’s atmosphere, its oceans and plant and animal life, as well as the land’s surface. In 1815 William Smith combined geological analysis with statistical methodology to produce the first national thematic geological map of England, ‘The Strata of England’, and other scientists used these methods to create a new visual language of cartographic representation.12 The rise of lithography led to lower costs and wider circulation. By the mid-1840s, printers in France were able to produce colour-printed lithographic maps of the geology of France at a cost of 3.5 francs each, in contrast to the usual engraved handcoloured copies, which cost 21 francs a copy.13 Such maps were sufficiently cheap that they could be printed in their thousands rather than hundreds, creating a public market that dwarfed the circulation of Blaeu’s Atlas maior or the Carte de Cassini.

  Among these changes in mapmaking, most of which were brought about by individuals who did not even call themselves geographers, geography as a discipline found itself in ferment. Mapmaking’s place within it seemed hopelessly confused, especially in Britain, where the inability of mapmaking to develop in an organized fashion had become a standard refrain in learned circles. As late as 1791, the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, complained that Bengal was mapped more accurately than England. ‘I should rejoice could I say that Britons, fond as they are of being considered by surrounding nations as taking the lead in scientific improvements, could boast a general map of their island as well executed as Major Rennel’s delineation of Bengal’, a reference to James Rennel’s East India Company-sponsored Bengal Atlas (1779).14 Although 65 per cent of England had been surveyed at this time, the results were patchy. They lacked uniformity or standardization despite the formal creation of the state-sponsored Ordnance Survey in 1791, following Roy’s initial survey work in 1784. Private maps of estates had been in use for centuries, but were usually made by local surveyors to serve the interests of landowners. As a result they used a variety of scales incompatible with the standardized aims of the Ordnance Survey, but which were often cheaper and more detailed. The prohibitive cost of a national survey meant that the Ordnance Survey left large tracts of land to be mapped by private surveyors. The result was a cartographic patchwork of uneven coverage.

  In contrast to the Ordnance Survey’s difficulty in providing standardized maps of England’s complex and entrenched system of land ownership and management, the English East India Company assumed it would be much easier to survey overseas possessions like India by using new scientific techniques and si
mply ignoring local methods of mapping and owning land, notwithstanding the country’s size. In the 1760s the company began providing financial support to individuals like Rennel for surveys that culminated in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. The survey was judged complete by 1843, but work carried on for decades, and, like the Cassini surveys, it has no decisive terminal date. In the words of Matthew Edney, the survey’s most distinguished historian, the surveyors ‘did not map the “real” India. They mapped the India they perceived and that they governed’, and as a consequence created ‘a British India’.15 A similar process took place in Africa. When Joseph Conrad’s protagonist Marlow peers at an imperial map in Heart of Darkness (1899), ‘marked with all the colours of the rainbow’, he is pleased to see ‘a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’.16 In contrast to the French (blue), Portuguese (orange), Italian (green), German (purple) and Belgian (yellow) imperial possessions, the red patches of British dominion represent the pinnacle of Britain’s civilizing imperial mission – at least for enthusiastic supporters like Conrad.17 But as in the case of India, many of these maps showed imperial spheres of interest rather than direct colonial rule, little more than examples of the aspirational ‘unofficial mind’ of imperialism, which was driven by private initiatives like the RGS.

  These organizations promoted a cartography that was more of an ideological projection based on apparently objective scientific principles than an administrative reality. Perhaps the most infamous example of Europe’s use of mapmaking to lay claim to imperial territories is the Berlin Conference on Africa of 1884–5. It is still regarded as initiating the imperial ‘scramble for Africa’, with the assumption that its fourteen attending European powers proceeded to carve up the continent along the lines expressed in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In fact, the minutes of the conference show it was convened to regulate European commercial access primarily in West Africa rather than partition the entire continent.18 One British official expressed ‘grave objections to [the conference’s] definitions of the Congo which do not accord with geographical facts’, while another protested that their geography was so confused that it was like drawing a map of the Rhine in the basin of the Rhône.19 The conference did not produce any maps dividing Africa according to European interests, nor did it produce any binding statements on sovereignty, other than vague agreements to sanction subsequent claims to possession based on the principles of free trade, rather than political geography.