A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  11. C. Koeman, ‘Life and Works of Willem Janszoon Blaeu: New Contributions to the Study of Blaeu, Made during the Last Hundred Years’, Imago Mundi, 26 (1972), pp. 9–16, gives this date as 1617. I am grateful to Jan Werner for providing the correct date.

  12. Herman Richter, ‘Willem Jansz. Blaeu with Tycho Brahe on Hven, and his Map of the Island: Some New Facts’, Imago Mundi, 3 (1939), pp. 53–60.

  13. Quoted in Klaas van Berkel, ‘Stevin and the Mathematical Practitioners’, in Klaas van Berkel, Albert van Helden and Lodewijk Palm (eds.), A History of Science in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1999), pp. 13–36, at p. 19.

  14. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Oxford, 2000), pp. 163–5.

  15. Günter Schilder, ‘Willem Jansz. Blaeu’s Wall Map of the World, on Mercator’s Projection, 1606–07 and its Influence’, Imago Mundi, 31 (1979), pp. 36–54.

  16. Quoted ibid., pp. 52–3.

  17. James Welu, ‘Vermeer: His Cartographic Sources’, Art Bulletin, 57 (1975), p. 529.

  18. Nadia Orenstein et al., ‘Print Publishers in the Netherlands 1580–1620’, in Dawn of the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 167–200.

  19. Cornelis Koeman and Marco van Egmond, ‘Surveying and Official Mapping in the Low Countries, 1500–ca. 1670’, in Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 1246–95, at p. 1270.

  20. Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, pp. 97–8, and ‘Mapping the Dutch World Overseas in the Seventeenth Century’, in Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 1433–62.

  21. J. Keuning, ‘The History of an Atlas: Mercator-Hondius’, Imago Mundi, 4 (1947), pp. 37–62, Peter van der Krogt, Koeman’s Atlantes Neerlandici, 3 vols. (Houten, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 145–208.

  22. J. Keuning, ‘Jodocus Hondius Jr’, Imago Mundi, 5 (1948), pp. 63–71, Ir. C. Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici: Bibliography of Terrestrial, Maritime, and Celestial Atlases and Pilot Books, Published in the Netherlands up to 1800, 6 vols. (Amsterdam, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 159–88.

  23. Quoted in J. Keuning, ‘Blaeu’s Atlas’, Imago Mundi, 14 (1959), pp. 74–89, at pp. 76–7; Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. 1, pp. 73–85; van der Krogt, Koeman’s Atlantes, vol. 1, pp. 31–231.

  24. Edward Luther Stevenson, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, 1571–1638 (New York, 1914), pp. 25–6.

  25. Günter Schilder, The Netherland Nautical Cartography from 1550 to 1650 (Coimbra, 1985), p. 107.

  26. Koeman et al., ‘Commercial Cartography’, pp. 1324–30.

  27. Quoted in Keuning, ‘Blaeu’s Atlas’, p. 77.

  28. Jonathan Israel, ‘Frederick Henry and the Dutch Political Factions, 1625–1642’, English Historical Review, 98 (1983), pp. 1–27.

  29. Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, p. 91.

  30. Keuning, ‘Blaeu’s Atlas’, pp. 78–9, Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. 1, pp. 86–198, van der Krogt, Koeman’s Atlantes, vol. 1, pp. 209–466.

  31. Quoted in Keuning, ‘Blaeu’s Atlas’, p. 80.

  32. Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 107–8.

  33. De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp. 490–91; J. R. Bruin et al. (eds.), Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 170–88.

  34. Günter Schilder, ‘Organization and Evolution of the Dutch East India Company’s Hydrographic Office in the Seventeenth Century’, Imago Mundi, 28 (1976), pp. 61–78; Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, p. 120.

  35. Ibid., pp. 122–4.

  36. Ibid., p. 122.

  37. Ibid., p. 124.

  38. Ir. C. Koeman, Joan Blaeu and his Grand Atlas (Amsterdam, 1970), pp. 8–10.

  39. Verwey, ‘Blaeu and his Sons’, p. 9.

  40. Koeman, Grand Atlas, pp. 9–10.

  41. Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. 1, pp. 199–294, van der Krogt, Koeman’s Atlantes, vol. 2, pp. 316–458.

  42. Koeman, Grand Atlas, pp. 43–6, Peter van der Krogt, ‘Introduction’, in Joan Blaeu, Atlas maior of 1665 (Cologne, 2005), pp. 36–7.

  43. Koeman, Grand Atlas, pp. 53–91.

  44. Joan Blaeu, Atlas maior of 1665, p. 12.

  45. Ibid.

  46. See e.g. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, pp. 222–37.

  47. Quoted in Alpers, The Art of Describing, p. 159.

  48. Herman de la Fontaine Verwey, ‘The Glory of the Blaeu Atlas and “the Master Colourist”’, Quaerendo, 11/3 (1981), pp. 197–229.

  49. Johannes Keuning, ‘The Novus Atlas of Johannes Janssonius’, Imago Mundi, 8 (1951), pp. 71–98.

  50. Quoted in Koeman, Grand Atlas, p. 95.

  51. Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. 1, pp. 199–200.

  52. Peter van der Krogt and Erlend de Groot (eds.), The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem, 7 vols. (Utrecht, 1996); Verwey, ‘The Glory of the Blaeu Atlas’, pp. 212–19.

  CHAPTER 9. NATION: THE CASSINI FAMILY MAP OF FRANCE, 1793

  1. Quoted in Monique Pelletier, Les Cartes des Cassini: la science au service de l’état et des régions (Paris, 2002), p. 167.

  2. Quoted ibid.

  3. Quoted in Anne Godlewska, ‘Geography and Cassini IV: Witness and Victim of Social and Disciplinary Change’, Cartographica, 35/3–4 (1998), pp. 25–39, at p. 35.

  4. To avoid confusion between the four generations of Cassinis, historians label the Cassinis I to IV.

  5. Marcel Roncayolo, ‘The Department’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 2: Space (Chicago, 2006), pp. 183–231.

  6. Montesquieu, quoted in David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 11.

  7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983, rev. edn. 1991).

  8. James R. Akerman, ‘The Structuring of Political Territory in Early Printed Atlases’, Imago Mundi, 47 (1995), pp. 138–54, at p. 141; David Buisseret, ‘Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps in France before the Accession of Louis XIV’, in Buisseret (ed.), Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1992), pp. 99–124, at p. 119.

  9. Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, 2009).

  10. Quoted in David J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995), p. 69.

  11. Ibid., pp. 151–6.

  12. David Turnbull, ‘Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces’, Imago Mundi, 48 (1996), pp. 5–24.

  13. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 39.

  14. Ibid., p. 40. On the changing role of the surveyor, see E. G. R. Taylor, ‘The Surveyor’, Economic History Review, 17/2 (1947), pp. 121–33.

  15. John Leonard Greenberg, The Problem of the Earth’s Shape from Newton to Clairaut (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–2.

  16. Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–1848: Science, Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago, 1987), pp. 5–6.

  17. Ibid., p. 7.

  18. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 54.

  19. Mary Terrall, ‘Representing the Earth’s Shape: The Polemics Surrounding Maupertuis’s Expedition to Lapland’, Isis, 83/2 (1992), pp. 218–37.

  20. Pelletier, Cassini, p. 79.

  21. Quoted in Terrall, ‘Representing the Earth’s Shape’, p. 223.

  22. Mary Terrall, The Man who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), pp. 88–130.

  23. Quoted in Michael Rand Hoare, The Quest for the True Figure of the Earth (Aldershot, 2005), p. 157.

  24. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 79.

&nbs
p; 25. Quoted in Monique Pelletier, ‘Cartography and Power in France during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Cartographica, 35/3–4 (1998), pp. 41–53, at p. 49.

  26. Konvitz, Cartography in France, p. 14, Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (London, 2007), pp. 4–5.

  27. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton, 1980), p. 115, Konvitz, Cartography in France, p. 16.

  28. Quoted in Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago, 2005), pp. 22–3.

  29. Christine Marie Petto, When France was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Plymouth, 2007); Mary Sponberg Pedley, ‘The Map Trade in Paris, 1650–1825’, Imago Mundi, 33 (1981), pp. 33–45.

  30. Josef W. Konvitz, ‘Redating and Rethinking the Cassini Geodetic Surveys of France, 1730–1750’, Cartographica, 19/1 (1982), pp. 1–15.

  31. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 95.

  32. On Cassini III’s estimates, see Konvitz, Cartography in France, pp. 22–4. On salaries, see Peter Jones, ‘Introduction: Material and Popular Culture’, in Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman (eds.), The Enlightenment World (Oxford, 2004), pp. 347–8.

  33. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, pp. 117–18.

  34. Ibid., pp. 123–4.

  35. Ibid., p. 128.

  36. Ibid., p. 143.

  37. Ibid., p. 144.

  38. Ibid., pp. 232–3.

  39. Pedley, Commerce of Cartography, pp. 85–6.

  40. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 135.

  41. Ibid., p. 140.

  42. Quoted in Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p. 70.

  43. Ibid., p. 15.

  44. Quoted in Anne Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago, 1999), p. 80.

  45. Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p. 69.

  46. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, quoted in Linda and Marsha Frey, The French Revolution (Westport, Conn., 2004), p. 3.

  47. Quoted in Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p. 76.

  48. Ibid., pp. 14, 22, 13–14.

  49. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 165.

  50. Ibid., p. 169.

  51. Quoted in Godlewska, Geography Unbound, p. 84.

  52. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 170.

  53. Quoted in Robb, Discovery of France, pp. 202–3.

  54. London Literary Gazette, no. 340, Saturday, 26 July 1823, p. 471.

  55. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 244.

  56. Ibid., pp. 246–7.

  57. Ibid., p. 243.

  58. Sven Widmalm, ‘Accuracy, Rhetoric and Technology: The Paris–Greenwich Triangulation, 1748–88’, in Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 179–206.

  59. Konvitz, Cartography in France, pp. 25–8; Gillispie, Science and Polity, pp. 122–30; Lloyd Brown, The Story of Maps (New York, 1949), pp. 255–65.

  60. Ibid., p. 255.

  61. Bernard de Fontenelle, quoted in Matthew Edney, ‘Mathematical Cosmography and the Social Ideology of British Cartography, 1780–1820’, Imago Mundi, 46 (1994), pp. 101–16, at p. 104.

  62. Quoted in Godlewska, Geography Unbound, p. 83.

  63. Pedley, Commerce of Cartography, p. 22.

  64. Quoted in Pelletier, Cassini, p. 133.

  65. Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p. 6.

  66. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 11, 19.

  67. Quoted in Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008), p. 47.

  68. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 22. Anderson rectified the omission of maps in the second edition of his book, but confined his analysis to their usage by modern colonial states.

  CHAPTER 10. GEOPOLITICS: HALFORD MACKINDER, ‘THE GEOGRAPHICAL PIVOT OF HISTORY’, 1904

  1. ‘Prospectus of the Royal Geographical Society’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1 (1831), pp. vii–xii.

  2. Ibid., pp. vii–viii.

  3. Quarterly Review, 46 (Nov. 1831), p. 55.

  4. David Smith, Victorian Maps of the British Isles (London, 1985).

  5. Walter Ristow, ‘Lithography and Maps, 1796–1850’, in David Woodward (ed.), Five Centuries of Map Printing (Chicago, 1975), pp. 77–112.

  6. Arthur Robinson, ‘Mapmaking and Map Printing: The Evolution of a Working Relationship’, in Woodward, Five Centuries of Map Printing, pp. 14–21.

  7. Matthew Edney, ‘Putting “Cartography” into the History of Cartography: Arthur H. Robinson, David Woodward, and the Creation of a Discipline’, Cartographic Perspectives, 51 (2005), pp. 14–29; Peter van der Krogt, ‘“Kartografie” or “Cartografie”?’, Caert-Thresoor, 25/1 (2006), pp. 11–12; Oxford English Dictionary, entries on ‘cartography’ and ‘cartographer’.

  8. Matthew Edney, ‘Mathematical Cosmography and the Social Ideology of British Cartography, 1780–1820’, Imago Mundi, 46 (1994), pp. 101–16, at p. 112.

  9. John P. Snyder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago, 1993), pp. 98–9, 112–13, 150–54, 105.

  10. Arthur Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago, 1982), pp. 15–17.

  11. Ibid., pp. 160–62.

  12. Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World (London, 2001).

  13. Karen Severud Cook, ‘From False Starts to Firm Beginnings: Early Colour Printing of Geological Maps’, Imago Mundi, 47 (1995), pp. 155–72, at pp. 160–62.

  14. Quoted in Smith, Victorian Maps, p. 13.

  15. Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997), pp. 2–3.

  16. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London, 1995), p. 25.

  17. Halford Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (London, 1902), p. 343.

  18. Jeffrey C. Stone, ‘Imperialism, Colonialism and Cartography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 13/1 (1988), pp. 57–64.

  19. Quoted in William Roger Louis, ‘The Berlin Congo Conference and the (Non-) Partition of Africa, 1884–85’, in Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London, 2006), pp. 75–126, at p. 102.

  20. T. H. Holdich, ‘How Are We to Get Maps of Africa’, Geographical Journal, 18/6 (1901), pp. 590–601, at p. 590.

  21. Halford Mackinder, ‘The Round World and the Winning of the Peace’, Foreign Affairs, 21/1 (1943), pp. 595–605, at p. 595.

  22. Gerry Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford, 2009), p. 37; E. W. Gilbert, ‘The Right Honourable Sir Halford J. Mackinder, P.C., 1861–1947’, Geographical Journal, 110/1–3 (1947), pp. 94–9, at p. 99.

  23. Halford Mackinder, ‘Geography as a Pivotal Subject in Education’, Geographical Journal, 27/5 (1921), pp. 376–84, at p. 377.

  24. Brian Blouet, ‘The Imperial Vision of Halford Mackinder’, Geographical Journal, 170/4 (2004), pp. 322–9; Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, pp. 39–50.

  25. Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, including an Autobiographical Chapter, 3 vols. (London, 1887), vol. 1, p. 336.

  26. Quoted in Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, p. 44.

  27. Ibid., p. 47.

  28. See Denis Cosgrove, ‘Extra-terrestrial Geography’, in Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London, 2008), pp. 34–48.

  29. Quoted in Charles Kruszewski, ‘The Pivot of History’, Foreign Affairs, 32 (1954), pp. 388–401, at p. 390.

  30. Halford Mackinder, ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geograp
hy’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 9/3 (1887), pp. 141–74, at p. 141.

  31. Ibid., p. 145.

  32. Ibid., pp. 159–60.

  33. ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geography – Discussion’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 9/3 (1887), pp. 160–74, at p. 166.

  34. D. I. Scargill, ‘The RGS and the Foundations of Geography at Oxford’, Geographical Journal, 142/3 (1976), pp. 438–61.

  35. Quoted in Kruszewski, ‘Pivot of History’, p. 390.

  36. Halford Mackinder, ‘Geographical Education: The Year’s Progress at Oxford’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 10/8 (1888), pp. 531–3, at p. 532.

  37. Halford Mackinder, ‘Modern Geography, German and English’, Geographical Journal, 6/4 (1895), pp. 367–79.

  38. Ibid., pp. 374, 376.

  39. Ibid., p. 379.

  40. Quoted in Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, p. 45.

  41. Halford Mackinder, ‘A Journey to the Summit of Mount Kenya, British East Africa’, Geographical Journal, 15/5 (1900), pp. 453–76, at pp. 453–4.

  42. Halford Mackinder, ‘Mount Kenya in 1899’, Geographical Journal, 76/6 (1930), pp. 529–34.

  43. Mackinder, ‘A Journey to the Summit’, pp. 473, 475.

  44. Ibid., p. 476.

  45. Blouet, ‘Imperial Vision’, pp. 322–9.

  46. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 358.

  47. Ibid., pp. 1–4.

  48. Ibid., pp. 11–12.

  49. Ibid., p. 358.

  50. Max Jones, ‘Measuring the World: Exploration, Empire and the Reform of the Royal Geographical Society’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 313–36.

  51. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976), p. 190.

  52. Halford Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal, 23/4 (1904), pp. 421–37, at pp. 421–2.

  53. Ibid., p. 422.

  54. Ibid., p. 431.

  55. Ibid., pp. 435–6.

  56. Pascal Venier, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History and Early Twentieth Century Geopolitical Culture’, Geographical Journal, 170/4 (2004), pp. 330–36.

  57. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 24.