Mapping, Connectivity and the Making of European Empires

Abstract

(1748)’. She shows that Anson’s voyage, and his maps and publication about it, may be read in terms of national hegemony and political authority in a period of enlightened cosmopolitanism. At moments, in specific places, and in different ways, Enlightenment mapping was about competition more than collaboration. Yannan Ding’s focus in ‘A Late Enlightenment Enterprise: The British East India Company’s (EIC) Survey of the Paracels in 1808’ is with that group of islands in the South China Sea and the patronage networks that drove their survey. In the work of the EIC, the demands of trade and practical utility outweighed those of scientific accuracy. In his ‘Enlightened Mapping? Maps in the Europe of the Enlightenment’, Peter Barber discusses the sponsors of Enlightened mapping—‘the state, scientific academies, and the commercial map trade, all made more powerful by increasing prosperity and technological advances’—and examines the uses in public, political and private spheres to which maps were put. The papers are uniformly strong and thoughtfully illustrated. Collingridge and Parker demonstrate the links between map history and print history, whether in newspapers and periodicals or in the edition history of exploration narratives. Parker and Yannan Ding are particularly attentive to recent Enlightenment historiography, and the latter utilizes new archival material to demonstrate the important place of hydrographic mapping (marine charting) as a mode of Enlightenment cartography. Each paper is supported by a full bibliography; those of Edney and Pedley and Barber especially are of considerable length and utility. By illuminating inter alia questions of historiography, epistemology, patronage, audience and the connections between Enlightenment and exploration, map history and print history, map practice and politics, this is an excellent set of papers. The authors are to be commended. The editors are to be congratulated, in this collection and in convening TOSCA, for providing a means to continue conversations on the Enlightenment and on map history.