Title: The National Archives
Description: The nineteenth-century maps and plans selected from the National Archives of the United Kingdom for this digital collection collectively picture Britain's striving for, defining of, and defense of its empire on every continent on the globe. Between 1780 and 1919, Britain claimed territories and spheres of influence in North America, Central America, the Caribbean, South America, West Africa, South Africa, North Africa, East Africa, India, China, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and others. It fought wars to prevent European rivals like Russia from gaining strength in the Near East and Central Asia. Britain also had a commercial or geopolitical stake in hundreds of conflicts in which it was not a primary belligerent. As a great naval and commercial power, Britain plied the seas and harbors of the world and charted the great rivers to continental interiors. Through a variety of colonial and then imperial methods, it attempted to define and rule over millions of indigenous subjects. Through warfare or political negotiation it attempted to keep in check colonial settler populations. The exploitation of mineral wealth was intrinsic to the imperial project and the redistribution of communal lands to private landholders an important means of control. And finally, Britain contended with all the great European powers over shares of the pie in the great conflagration of World War I. Every one of these fields of action required mapshand-drawn maps sketched by explorers in the field, topographical maps for military action, cadastral maps to codify property lines and assess taxes, diplomatic cartography that established national borders, ethnographic maps for governance and the regulation of labor, maps of mines and railroads for investors, hydrographic maps for those navigating commercial and military vessels. These maps are increasingly being explored by scholars not only for the geographical information they contain or as evidence of progressively more sophisticated cartographic techniques but also as artifacts rich with social, cultural, political, and historical meaning (Dym and Offen, p. 7). In the nineteenth century, Western mapmaking embraced geodesy and underwent a revolution in technique of which the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was an example. At the same time, the field of geography was professionalized and overseen by an increasing number of official national geographical societies, the Royal Geographical Society in London having paramount authority. There were terrific levels of investment in the effort to make mapmaking ever more scientific and the manifestation of the civilizing order Britain hoped to assert. Cartography developed directly as a corollary of the imperial project and its obsession with recording data, with measurement, and with enumeration. Today, the kinds of measuring that went with colonial governance and imperialist penetration of the globe are fascinating to scholars trying to understand the ideologies and mechanisms of those political, economic, and cultural projects more fully. So it is no surprise that an examination of these maps in their specific historical and social contexts has garnered the attention of those working not only in the history of cartography and spatial science but in social history, art history and anthropology, other social sciences, and literary studies. The geographer Matthew H. Edney argues that their study is "as revealing and as rewarding as any other work of art, literature, or science" (Dym and Offen, p. xv).
Subjects: Maps, Colonies
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 19th century