Mapping Connectivity And The Making Of European Empires

This volume seeks to collectively explore how maps can be used to understand the making of European empires, how the epistemological practices embedded in them can be approached to understand European imperial space-making, and how maps can be seen as representations of imaginaries of connectivity. Rehearsing mapping’s past and its multifarious relations with European imperial orders is not merely an historical exercise to contribute to a global history of cartography. What binds the several interventions is rather an awareness that looking at a particular moment of the past with composite methodologies and interdisciplinary gazes may harbour potential discoveries on the context-embedded relations between mapping, connectivity, and European empire to which we are not yet attuned. By exploring the imaginaries of the world in the mapping of Western modern empires, the book also links to the burgeoning literature on the history of international relations and empire. The emphasis on empires serves here as an important corrigendum for IR’s state centrism and Eurocentrism and contributes to further erode the myth of Westphalia.

Empire and maps are mutually reliant phenomena and traceable to the dawn of civilisation. Furthermore, maps retain a supremely authoritative status as unquestioned reflections of reality. In today’s image-saturated world, their influence is more powerful now than at any other time in history. This book argues that in the 21st century we are seeing an imperial renaissance in the European Union (EU), a political organisation which defies categorisation, but whose power and influence grows by the year. It examines the past, present, and future of the EU to demonstrate that empire is not a category of state but rather a collective imagination which reshapes history and appropriates an artificial past to validate the policies of the present and the ambitions of the future. In doing so, this book illuminates the imperial discourse that permeates the mass maps of the modern EU. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of political science, EU Studies, Human Geography, European political history, cartography and visual methodologies and international relations.

The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities offers a vibrant exploration of the intersection and convergence between map studies and the humanities through the multifaceted traditions and inclinations from different disciplinary, geographical and cultural contexts. With 42 chapters from leading scholars, this book provides an intellectual infrastructure to navigate core theories, critical concepts, phenomenologies and ecologies of mapping, while also providing insights into exciting new directions for future scholarship. It is organised into seven parts: Part 1 moves from the depths of the humans–maps relation to the posthuman dimension, from antiquity to the future of humanity, presenting a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges chronological distances, introspective instances and social engagements. Part 2 draws on ancient, archaeological, historical and literary sources, to consider the materialities and textures embedded in such texts. Fictional and non-fictional cartographies are explored, including layers of time, mobile historical phenomena, unmappable terrain features, and even animal perspectives. Part 3 examines maps and mappings from a medial perspective, offering theoretical insight into cartographic mediality as well as studies of its intermedial relations with other media. Part 4 explores how a cultural cartographic perspective can be productive in researching the digital as a human experience, considering the development of a cultural attentiveness to a wide range of map-related phenomena that interweave human subjectivities and nonhuman entities in a digital ecology. Part 5 addresses a range of issues and urgencies that have been, and still are, at the centre of critical cartographic thinking, from politics, inequalities and discrimination. Part 6 considers the growing amount of literature and creative experimentation that involve mapping in practices of eliciting individual life histories, collective identities and self-accounts. Part 7 examines the variety of ways in which we can think of maps in the public realm. This innovative and expansive Handbook will appeal to those in the fields of geography, art, philosophy, media and visual studies, anthropology, history, digital humanities and cultural studies as well as industry professionals.

Good addition to handbooks programme, no direct competitiors HIST section of ISA is growing each year Faced with an uncertain future, an increasing number of scholars have looked to the past for guidance, patterns and ideas. This tendency has been clear, despite theoretical and methodological difference, this book will fill a lacuna.

Volume 1: Theories, Methods and Ideas explores the mobility of ideas through time and space and how interdisciplinary theories and methodological approaches used in mobilities studies can be profitably utilised within the humanities and social sciences. Through a series of short chapters, mobility is employed as an elastic, inclusive and multifaceted concept across various disciplines to shed light on a geographically and chronologically broad range of issues and case studies. In doing so, the concept of mobility is positioned as a powerful catalyst for historical change and as a fruitful approach to research in the humanities and social sciences. Like its sister volume, this volume is edited and written by members of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and The Ancient World (DiSSGeA) of the University of Padua, Italy. The structure of the book mirrors the Theories and Methods, and Ideas thematic research clusters of the Centre. Afterwords from leading scholars from other institutions synthesise and reflect upon the findings of each section. This volume, together with Volume 2: Objects, People and Texts, makes a compelling case for the use of mobility studies as a research framework in the humanities and social sciences. As such, it will be of interest to students and researchers in various disciplines.

The book proposes a new epistemological and methodological approach to concept formation across human and natural sciences, beyond Eurocentrism and specism. It elaborates a method enabling global epistemics to cope with multiplex challenges coming from geohistorical as well as epistemological standpoints whose methodological potential remains unexplored. It assumes monstrosity as the generative grammar of a new holistic approach to human knowledge, and draws from postcolonial, decolonial or post-western perspectives to place new methodological cornerstones, as well as from arts, astrology and magic from the Islamic and European Renaissance, indigenous knowledge, genetics, theoretical physics or Afrofuturism. The book aims at provoking a shift in critical perspectives, which do not acknowledge their own inability to steam an appropriate methodology of terminological and conceptual elaboration for the lexicon of contemporary human knowledge, out of a pressing demand: once agreed upon the world as a single yet multilayered spacetime of analysis, how should research about large-scale/long-term processes of social change advance, in order to cope with the asymmetrical power relations that materialize colonial history through heterarchies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, knowledge, cosmology and ecology? This book struggles against the prejudice that the instances heterogeneous yet non canonical epistemics are in fact exclusively confined to provincial, exotic or solipsistic particularisms; therefore never as universalistic as the dominant ones. To address this problem, the book proposes: a different way to think of the relation between the abstract and the concrete; a new relation between data or histories, and concepts; an alternative pathway to cross-cultural translation in conceptual and terminological analysis; a new posture to inhabit the spacetimes at the border between translation and untranslatability.

Land is at the centre of crucial public debates ranging from climate adaptation to housing and development, to agriculture and indigenous peoples’ rights. These debates frequently become stuck, though, because the meaning of land in different contexts is poorly understood. Bringing together specialists of epistemology and land, this volume is a landmark contribution to understanding land knowledge as a complex factor in these debates. Land has been known in astonishingly different ways throughout history, but in recent decades one particular understanding of land as commodity has become increasingly hegemonic globally. This understanding has enormously destructive effects, not only for many people and animals living on and from the land that is increasingly grabbed for extractivist purposes, but also for possible imaginations of how humans can relate to land in the future. In Epistemologies of Land, scholars reconstruct how the understanding of land has come to be reduced to “land as commodity” historically, what the consequences of this epistemological transformation have been, and what alternative ways of understanding land could help establish intellectually abundant and ecologically sustainable ways of relating to the land we live on. Particularly, the book shows how a change in perspective – thinking society through land – can lay the foundation not only for knowing more about land, but for a different kind of environmental and social knowledge that could recover forgotten wisdom of how humans and animals have historically related to land, and by that transform the ways in which land contributes to our daily life beyond its diminished meaning as an economic resource. Contributors include: Eloisa Berman Arevalo, Shailaja Fennell, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Katarina Kusic, Maarten Meijer, David Nally, Sakshi, Leo Steeds, and Anna Wolkenhauer.