Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires

Description

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. Mapping, Connectivity and the Making of European Empires Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Note Preface: Poseidonians and the Tragedy of Mapping European Empires 1 Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity 2 Mapping the Invention of the Early ‘Spanish’ Empire 3 Freezing Cartographic Imaginaries: Mapping the Rediscovery of Greenland and the Restoring of the Danish Monarchy 4 Surveying in British North America: A Homology of Property and Territory 5 Empires of Science, Science of Empires: Mapping, Centres of Calculation and the Making of Imperial Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Germany 6 Representing France’s Syrian ‘Colony without a Flag’: Imperial Cartographic Strategies at the Margin of the Peace Conference 7 The Cartographic Lives of the Italian Fascist Empire Index About the Editors and Contributors