Maps and Politics PDF
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Maps and Politics Jeremy Black So spread the word. Spread the map! South is superior. South dominates! Long live AUSTRALIA – RULER OF THE UNIVERSE! Maps and Politics , PICTURING HISTORY Series Editors Peter Burke Sander L. Gilman Roy Porter Bob Scribner In the same series Health and illness Images of Difference Sander L. Gilman The Devil A Mask without a Face Luther Link Reading Iconotexts From Swift to the French Revolution Peter Wagner Men in Black John Harvey Eyes of Love The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels 1840-1900 Stephen Kern The Destruction of Art Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution Dario Gamboni The Feminine Ideal Marianne Thesander Trading Territories Mapping the Early Modem World Jerry Brotton Picturing Empire Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire James R. Ryan Pictures and Visuality in Early Modem Ollna Craig Clunas Maps and Politics Jeremy Black REAKTION BOOKS For Roy Porter Published by Reaktion Books Ltd II Rathbone Place, London w 1 P 1 DE, UK First published 1997 Copyright © Jeremy Black, 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers. Jacket designed by Ron Costley Designed by Humphrey Stone Photoset by Wilmaset Ltd, Wirral Colour printed by BAS Printers, Hants Printed and bound in Great Britain by BiddIes Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Black, Jeremy, Maps and politics. - (Picturing history) I. Historical geography 2. Cartography - Political aspects 3. Maps - Political aspects 4. Territory, National 5. Boundaries I. Title 911'.09 ISBN 1 861890125 Contents Preface 7 Introduction 9 I Cartography as Power II 2 Mapping the World and its Peoples 29 3 Socio-Economic Issues and Cartography 59 4 The Problems of Mapping Politics 98 5 Frontiers 121 6 War as an Aspect of Political Cartography 147 7 Conclusion 164 References 169 Picture Acknowledgements 181 Index 183 No digital rights The detailed map of an imaginary land that is more real to many children than the maps of non fictional countries. The island of Sodor from the Reverend W. Awdry's Favourite Thomas the Tank Engine Stories (1991). The doings of Thomas the Tank Engine and other friends can be readily followed. This is a world in which travelling is all, and the routes of journeys are of far less importance. Preface Books with maps in them are among my early memories of reading, the imaginary maps that Arthur Ransome drew for his saga of childhood ad venture, Swallows and Amazons, and the maps of medieval battles and campaigns produced by R.R. Sellman. As a child I drew maps of an ima ginary country, its tactility, indeed reality, created by mapping. At school I took both geography and history to 'A' level, and the choice of which sub ject to follow at university level was difficult. Concerned about the apparent mathematicization of geography, I chose history, and did not pursue maps: historical geography 'belonged' to the geographers. I re mained interested in maps, but a scholarly concern did not return until 1992. Since then I have increasingly worked on historical cartography and related topics. This has led to two projects. Maps and History, a lengthy work tracing historical cartography from its origins and concentrating on historical atlases, is to be published in 1997. Maps and Politics, the present book, is designed as a shorter study, more closely focused on recent and contemporary concerns. It is linked to a course I am introducing at the University of Exeter. I have benefited greatly from the friendliness of the map world. I would like to thank in particular the exemplary staff of the Map Room of the Brit ish Library. I have also benefited from work in the map rooms of the National Library of Scotland and the libraries of Ball State, British Colum bia, Cambridge, Colorado (Boulder), Denver, Newcastle, Oxford, Texas, Texas Christian, Western Ontario and York (Ontario) Universities. I have benefited from the advice ofJ ohn Andrews, Paul Harvey, Robert Peberdy, Charles Withers and three anonymous readers on earlier versions of the work. I am grateful for the opportunity to develop some of the following ideas in lectures at the University oflllinois (Urbana), the Warburg Institute and Guildhall University. lowe much to the secretarial support of Wendy Duery. This book is dedicated to a historian I greatly admire. Roy Porter is not only a superb scholar with an amazing range and an accessible style, he is also all too rare among modem, academic historians in being able and willing 7 to make the past immediate and interesting to the wider public. That Roy is an engaging, lively and humane individual is also worth mentioning. 8
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