Cartography
Maps and Politics
Jeremy Black
Reaktion Books, #19.95
Representation
Picturing Empire
James Ryan
Reaktion Books, #25
SINCE the 1960s, under the influence of such luminaries as Michel Foucault and Carlo Ginzburg, the goalposts of
historical research have been moved. Documents are no longer media through which we read past events, but have become events in themselves to be
interrogated as to the aesthetics and assumptions that
accompanied their production.
Reaktion Books has been
producing for some years, closely argued and beautifully printed interrogations of the painting, the photograph, and the map.
In Maps and Politics, Jeremy Black brings cartography within this archaeology, exploring in a series of telling and engaging anecdotes the hidden purposes and aesthetics of what seems, on the 2-D surface, the most
objective of representations.
He reflects that to map has been synonymous with the
establishment of dominion.
One need only think of Cook and the Pacific Islands, or of Mason and Dixon to understand the power of lines on paper to effect lives. But Black goes
further, questioning the priorities of the Ordnance Survey, where roads expand and space
diminishes, as well as the uses made of different map
projections, where countries shrink or grow according to imperial preference.
One of the best of the many fine illustrations is by way of a killing joke. MacArthur's
Universal Corrective Map of the World puts the South Pole at the top of the page and the meridian through Sydney, and proclaims that Australia henceforth rules the Universe.
The shock of the image
illustrates better than words the depth of our weddedness to assumed images of reality.
However, James Ryan's
Picturing Empire goes a lot
further than provoking and entertaining.
His record of the role of
photography in the exploration, then military conquest of Empire, and in its justification and maintenance through racist pseudo-science, is an insightful window on the Victorian mind.
His account of the work of Livingstone in Africa and Bourne in India delineates the complex of ideas with which our forbears undertook the Imperial Project. Africa was pictured empty. The conventions of
landscape and fauna that are still with us today were
established early.
Any evidence of native culture was attributed, in the words of Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society, to ''the work of foreign artists''.
Where it was not possible to remove the human from the new-found land, in India, Bourne sought images that made of Kashmir a form of Surrey,
contributing to the project of domestication rather than
''discovery''.
The photography of racial classification was a ''scientific'' adjunct to bogus Darwinism. But by 1900 the natives appear in a context (of British bridges and settlements, the
achievements of Empire) and not as specimens for measurement.
They enter the imagery of Empire as the grateful recipients of civilisation, and find a place in the representation of their
homelands, since they are safely our homelands too.
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