Question

Essay on "History of maps"

Answer 1

Answer:

Maps are now such commonplace objects and geographical forms so standardized in our minds that it is hard to imagine a world in which this was not so. For example, we recognize the shape of a familiar landmass like Africa, whether it appears on a map, a coffee mug or on the back of a teenager's partly shaved head. When our standard view is challenged, we are disturbed and angry. Showing the Australian map of the world with south on top provokes a roar of outrage from a college history class: "Turn it right side up!" But there is a history of cartography, a history of the development of mapping, and it is not a simple story of forward progress. And there will be a history of future mapping, which may take forms as yet unimagined by us.

The field of the history of cartography has been transformed in the past two decades. A map has been traditionally defined by geographers as a "representation of things in space," a definition that implies a certain level of physical correspondence. A new definition, according to Harley and Woodward, reads thus: "Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world." This definition takes one away from seeing maps as objective representations of physical space into considering them as human documents with all their attendant biases and failings. Such artifacts as diagrams of imaginary cosmographies, landscape paintings, and "mental maps" may now be considered maps. The working out of this definition is seen in its widest form in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies (volume 2, book 3 of History of Cartography), which discusses the dreaming diagrams of the Australian aborigines, the cosmographic calendars of the Mayans, and ritual sand paintings of the Navajos. These works are not "maps" in the traditional sense, but they do incorporate spatial relationships and individual places, often in terms of spiritual significance.

Traditionally, the history of cartography had been dominated by geographers and was viewed as a triumphal march toward the increasingly accurate, measured maps of the present. Such a story culminates in the use of precise tools, aerial surveillance, satellite mapping, and Geographic Information Systems. The maps of the past tended to be discounted as crude and clumsy approximations of "real" space. Not that these early map historians were slipshod-despite the changes in the orientation of the field, classics, such as books by Raymond Beazley (The Dawn of Modern Geography), George Kimble (Geography in the Middle Ages), and John Wright (The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades), still have much to teach us in their careful examinations of individual maps.

As historians of cartography have moved away from geographical accuracy as the chief quality of a map, they examine instead maps in themselves. What was the mapmaker intending to show? Is it possible that measurement was not particularly important and that some other consideration shaped the map in question? Editors Harley and Woodward address these questions in Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (volume 1 of The History of Cartography), which appeared in 1987 and pulls together the research of many scholars of the preceding decades. Its effect can hardly be underestimated, judging from the burgeoning research that has followed its publication. Volume 2 is published in three parts: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, Cartography in Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, and the book on traditional non-European societies cited above. Volume 3, on the cartography of the European Renaissance, will be issued shortly. Subsequent volumes will take the history up to the present time.

The field of the history of cartography has attracted scholars from a number of academic fields. Art historians, literary theorists, and political historians have joined geographers in studying and analyzing maps of the past. Art and Cartography, a selection of essays edited by Woodward, is a particularly interesting illustration of the cross-fertilization of academic fields.

Answer 2

Governments began to use maps as tools not only for foreign conquest and economic exploitation but to establish control at home and for purposes of national defense. Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Buisseret, is a collection of articles dealing with England, France, Spain, Austria, Italy, and Poland. This is the published version of the 1982 Nebenzahl Lectures, held annually at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

The essays explore, as the subtitle indicates, the increasing use of maps for political purposes. Josef W. Konvitz's Cartography in France, 1660-1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft is a more extensive work on France. Konvitz traces the state sponsorship of cartography from the administration of Colbert under Louis XIV, through the eighteenth century, when France completed the first national mapping project in Europe, conducted by successive members of the Cassini family. Konvitz shows how maps began to be used for military purposes, for designing canals and roads, and for economic and social programs. As governments took over the making of maps, the maps became secret documents, forbidden to fall into the hands of the enemy. Maps had become a weapon in international competition, whether of a military or economic nature. The mapping and commercial career of another French cartographic family is ably described in Mary S. Pedley's Bel et Utile: The Work of Robert de Vaugondy Family of Map-makers.

The maps that preceded the age of discoveries have been treated as curiosities, studied originally for their distortion of the world as we now perceive it. In the works of Raymond Beazley, George Kimble, and John Wright (mentioned above), medieval maps were ridiculed for their simplicity and religiosity. More recently, the same maps have been analyzed in their own terms and found to be eloquent expressions of a worldview that might inform our own. Chapters by David Woodward, Paul D.A. Harvey, and Tony Campbell in volume 1 of The History of Cartography, edited by Harley and Woodward, are a good place to start. Paul Harvey also wrote Medieval Maps and Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map, which are brief, well-illustrated essays that provide a good overview.

Hope its helpful for u ☘️