When France Was King of Cartography investigates over a thousand maps and nearly two dozen map producers, analyzes the map as a cultural artifact, map producers as a group, and the array of map viewers over the course of two centuries in France. The book focuses on situated knowledge or 'localized' interests reflected in these geographical productions. Through the lens of mapmaking, it examines the relationship between power and the practice of patronage, geography, and commerce in early modern France.
Patronage and cartographic glory -- Scientific cartography and statecraft -- Three colonial mapping endeavors : the case of the Americas -- Selling maps and selling power.
This book is a comparative study of the production and role of maps, charts, and atlases in early modern England and France with a particular focus on Paris and London.
Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century. Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles—iconography, context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps, traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted. In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.
Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800. The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.
The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides an international and in-depth overview of the field with chapters that examine the history, present condition and future significance of historical geography in relation to recent developments and current research.
Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.
This is the first world history of empire, reaching from the third millennium BCE to the present. By combining synthetic surveys, thematic comparative essays, and numerous chapters on specific empires, its two volumes provide unparalleled coverage of imperialism throughout history and across continents, from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas. Only a few decades ago empire was believed to be a thing of the past; now it is clear that it has been and remains one of the most enduring forms of political organization and power. We cannot understand the dynamics and resilience of empire without moving decisively beyond the study of individual cases or particular periods, such as the relatively short age of European colonialism. The history of empire, as these volumes amply demonstrate, needs to be drawn on the much broader canvas of global history. Volume I: The Imperial Experience is dedicated to synthesis and comparison. Following a comprehensive theoretical survey and bold world history synthesis, fifteen chapters analyze and explore the multifaceted experience of empire across cultures and through the ages. The broad range of perspectives includes: scale, world systems and geopolitics, military organization, political economy and elite formation, monumental display, law, mapping and registering, religion, literature, the politics of difference, resistance, energy transfers, ecology, memories, and the decline of empires. This broad set of topics is united by the central theme of power, examined under four headings: systems of power, cultures of power, disparities of power, and memory and decline. Taken together, these chapters offer a comprehensive and unique view of the imperial experience in world history.
French scientists, engineers, and public officials were responsible for the most important and distinctive innovations in cartography in eighteenth-century Europe. By expanding the analytical uses of maps, by establishing unprecedented standards of accuracy, and by nurturing institutional frameworks to sustain mapping projects over many years, the French contributed to one of the central concepts of modern times: that man, through direct observation and accumulated information can better understand and manage his affairs. Concentrating on how and why new concepts and techniques of making and using maps were introduced, Josef Konvitz skillfully traces the modernization of cartography during the French Enlightenment. The story he unfolds is not merely a narrative of who did what, but an analysis of how the map itself influenced attitudes toward the land and the consequent effects on planning and the development of resources. Throughout, Konvitz demonstrates the significant relationship between cartography and political, economic, and military life. He emphasizes efforts to enlarge the practical applications of maps in government and the impact of government policy on the evolution of cartography.
Though the political and intellectual history of mapmaking in the eighteenth century is well established, the details of its commercial revolution have until now been widely scattered. In The Commerce of Cartography, Mary Pedley presents a vivid picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of the maps themselves. Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map? A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, The Commerce of Cartography charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.
Drawing from the history of cartography, semiotics, geography, and urban studies, The Cartographic Capital examines how cartographic discourses of, and the history behind, government maps demonstrate to what extent the idea and views of urban agglomerations, and more specifically Paris, changed throughout the French Third Republic.
