It is an honour to have been granted a preview of Marie de Rugy’s new book. Imperial Borderlands might seem narrowly restricted, to a very particular portion of the world over just three decades, but de Rugy contributes significantly to a still new direction in the study of mapping and spatial history. To appreciate its innovation and significance, we need to situate her work within the interdisciplinary arena of map history and within the approaches that have been taken to maps and empire.
Right from the start, map history has pivoted about Europe’s empires and Western imperialism. When, during the Parisian cholera epidemic of Spring 1832, Alexander von Humboldt engaged in perhaps the first systematic inquiry into early maps – searching for the first maps to depict the new world and then seeking to ascertain their interrelationships – he was motivated by the transformation of Europe’s geographical knowledge and so of European intelligence and rationality that the “discovery” of the new world had supposedly wrought. The doubling of creation, Humboldt argued, gave a “huge boost to knowledge” that “gradually changed opinions, laws and political customs. Never before had a purely material discovery in extending the horizon produced a more extraordinary and lasting moral change.” The result, in line with the widely held stadial theories of cultural development, was the transformation of medieval, superstitious Europe into the modern, rational West.
Just a few years later, in 1840–42, the second viscount of Santarém, a Portuguese émigré in Paris, used early maps to prove the priority of the Portuguese discovery of the western coast of Africa. Portuguese ships under Gil Eames successfully rounded the treacherous Cape Bajador in 1434 and their pilots then mapped the coast, permitting the Portuguese government to claim the territory of Casamance, in Senegal, against French imperial claims.
As Europe’s imperial reach intensified, early maps were used to demonstrate the triumph of the West, to foster sentiment in favour of further imperial aggrandisement, and to debate competing imperialistic claims. Perhaps most important in sustaining the racialised ideology of modern empire, maps were narcissistically held up as mirrors in which Westerners could see and admire their own true, rational self to the exclusion of the mystical and irrational non-European other. Cartography was a marker of inherent Western superiority. Non-Western maps were noticed only to the extent that they could be presented as the timeless works of a different kind of mind, of a non-scientific mentality. (One of my favourite examples is a 1904 essay that presented an “ancient Chinese map” as characteristic of an irrational and childlike spatial understanding that had lasted unchanged for thousands of years. It was in fact a nineteenth-century, printed Korean world map of the relatively recently developed style of ch’ŏnhado; the work might not look anything like a Western world map, but both genre and artefact have histories.)
It should therefore not be surprising that, when map scholars finally queried the nature of maps and cartography, there quickly emerged a new concern with the role of maps in creating and sustaining empires. Several factors, not least the “spatial turn” in the humanities and the “cultural turn” in the social sciences, led scholars to realise that maps are not simply statements of geographical fact. They began, especially after 1980, to study maps as cultural documents that are as rich and as complex as any work of art or literature and as social instruments by which their users have organised and modified the world. The effects of this sociocultural reconfiguration were widespread. Entirely new arenas of study have opened up as scholars quickly abandoned the traditional fixation on regional and marine mapping in the early modern West. Map history still featured many studies of early modern maps, especially in their interrelations with art and literature, but it now paid close attention to all kinds of maps and plans from antiquity to the present.
In studying maps as social instruments, the initial move was to argue that modern cartography emerged in the Renaissance as a tool of social and political elites, that cartography was integral to the formation of modern states and empires. Maps were instruments for creating and preserving unequal power relations. As Brian Harley stated in a 1988 essay, “the ideological arrows have tended to fly largely in one direction, from the powerful to the weaker in society”; he continued by asserting that the “social history of maps … appears to have few genuinely popular, alternative, or subversive modes of expression. Maps are preeminently a language of power, not of protest.” In this context, cartography has been construed as thoroughly, perhaps completely, implicated with Western imperialism, with the construction of imperialistic sentiment, and with the exercise of power within particular empires. Cartography – understood as embracing all kinds of mapping and especially the systematic territorial surveys of the modern era – is a central plank of the infrastructure of knowledge that undergirds modern empire.
Detailed studies of mapping and empire were not as monolithically one-sided as this conceptual position has seemed. They have engendered a great deal of new historical insight into the spatiality of modern empires and the necessity of geographical envisioning in early modern and modern imperialism. Most recently, a few studies have explored how geographical knowledge has shaped the actions of imperial agents. I think in particular of works such as Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire (2017) and Ricardo Padrón’s The Indies of the Setting Sun (2020).
Yet they all have perpetuated statist strictures. Even Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped (1994), the first and perhaps the best of the new studies, focused on the Thai state’s cartographic response to territorial pressures exerted by its neighbouring French and British empires. The scholarly emphasis has consistently been on specific empires (British India, Dutch East Indies) and specific postcolonial states. There are, of course, sound intellectual and archival reasons for such precise spatial focus, but it does preclude the kind of systemic, connected analysis now advanced by de Rugy, of British and French mapping in the same interior, upland, and contested region of Indochina.
A particular benefit of de Rugy’s systemic analysis is that it substantially enlarges the relationship between imperial agents and the local Chinese and Vietnamese political structures from one solely of knowledge extraction (still absolutely important of course, as in James Scott’s forceful collection of local maps) to embrace persistent knowledge encounters, negotiations, and circulations. De Rugy identifies a certain commensurability between imperial and local powers in their mutual interest in mapping communication routes. In the difficult terrain of upland Indochina, the systematic mapping of territory – the supposed sine qua non of Western spatial rationality – was simply irrelevant; what was spatially important were the linear traces of the roads and rivers by which the inlands were accessed.
De Rugy thus questions the now accepted role of mapping in modern empires, not to dispute its importance but rather to qualify it. Rather than placing maps at the heart of her work, which is of course where map scholars have always placed them, de Rugy decentres them. This intellectual act requires a fundamental change in perspective, to realize that neither Western spatial rationality nor cartography exist and that, even in the West, people have always had multiple spatial conceptions and pursued multiple mapping strategies. Even as modern imperialists deluded themselves that they thought rationally and that their rationally structured maps distinguished them from the (supposedly) lesser peoples they now ruled, they actually thought about the varied places and spaces of states and empires in several different ways that were often commensurate with some of the ways in which the local populace thought about and mapped spaces and places.
Imperial Borderlands deals with the territorial edges of empire, where the frayed natures of imperial systems are more than evident. We would be remiss, however, to think that the multiplicity of mapping strategies and the active interweaving of imperial and local mapping practices are a function solely of the frontier. De Rugy demonstrates that the future direction for studies of mapping and empire, and in map history generally, needs to displace and deprivilege “the map” and to turn instead to how people across cultures engage with maps without the a priori assumptions of “cartography.”
Matthew H. Edney
University of Southern Maine
University of Wisconsin – Madison