The National Archives: Selected Maps Representing the Long 19th Century

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 maps—hand-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).

The British were meticulous about recording the major milestones in their effort to measure and graph the empire. Colonel C.F. Close (1865–1952), who penned “The Mapping of the British Territories” for The Oxford Survey of the British Empire, wrote that the mapping project that would become the Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom had military origins: the first official topographic survey was carried out in the middle of the eighteenth century as a result of the difficulties that the military had in putting down rebellion in the Scottish Highlands (p. 308). But maps were also generated to meet nonmilitary needs, such as a map of Ireland constructed in 1825–1842 for the purpose of valuing the land (p. 309). Published in 1914, Close's chapter also summarized the state of British mapping abroad to that point. In Africa, for example, 15,000 miles of British African frontiers had been accurately delimited, but while the coastlines and principle settlements of its various protectorates had been mapped with a fair degree of accuracy, maps of their interiors still largely consisted only of “rough sketches” (pp. 333–334). Similarly, many kinds of general purpose maps of Australia had been constructed, but topographical maps “practically [did] not exist” (p. 320). And while the whole of India had been mapped at various scales over the course of the previous century, Close surmised that the recently proposed project to create a modern map of India at the scale of 1 inch to 1 mile could take nearly another fifty years to complete (pp. 326–327).

Not all of the maps in this collection were created by the British and their colonial administrators: some represent military intelligence captured in war, such as Chinese maps and plans that were captured in the second Anglo-Chinese (Arrow) War of 1857. Students and researchers will find an extraordinary trove of documents, culled from the files of the Foreign Office, War Office, and Colonial Office, through which to explore changing national and colonial boundaries, shifting interests in natural resources, changing imperial paradigms of rule, the evolving national identities of those resisting imperial designs, and the increasingly complex interactions between imperial powers through World War I.

Sources:

• Close, C.F. “The Mapping of British Territories.” In The Oxford Survey of the British Empire. Vol. 6, General Survey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914.
• Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Dym, Jordana, and Karl Offen. Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
• Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• ———. Foreword to Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader. Edited by Jordana Dym and Karl Offen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.