Mapping European Empire

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.

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.

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book. Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.

First published in 1996. Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European people and places. In the exotic, uncomplicated and malleable settings of stories like Robinson Crusoe, they make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home. This book discusses the geography of literature and looking at where adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia.

In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities. "There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement "Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History "This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

Covering the period from the fall of the Roman Empire through to the beginnings of the Renaissance, this is an indispensable volume which brings the complex and colourful history of the Middle Ages to life. Key features: * geographical coverage extends to the broadest definition of Europe from the Atlantic coast to the Russian steppes * each map approaches a separate issue or series of events in Medieval history, whilst a commentary locates it in its broader context * as a body, the maps provide a vivid representation of the development of nations, peoples and social structures. With over 140 maps, expert commentaries and an extensive bibliography, this is the essential reference for those who are striving to understand the fundamental issues of this period.

Maps from virtually every culture and period convey our tendency to see our communities as the centre of the world (if not the universe) and, by implication, as superior to anything beyond our boundaries. This study examines how cartography has been used to prop up a variety of imperialist enterprises.

Maps and text cover 3,000 years of European history from 900 BC through 1993.