BiblioVault - Books about Cartography

Talking Maps

Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2019

Every map tells a story. Some provide a narrative for travelers, explorers, and surveyors or offer a visual account of changes to people’s lives and surroundings, while others tell imaginary tales, transporting us to fictional worlds created by writers and artists. In turn, maps generate more stories, taking users on new journeys in search of knowledge and adventure.

Drawing on the Bodleian Library’s outstanding map collection and covering almost a thousand years, Talking Maps takes a new approach to map-making by showing how maps and stories have always been intimately entwined. Including such rare treasures as a unique map of the Mediterranean from the eleventh-century Arabic Book of Curiosities, a twelfth-century map of the world by al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī, and C. S. Lewis’s map of Narnia, this fascinating book analyzes maps as objects that enable us to cross sea and land; as windows into alternative and imaginary worlds; as guides to reaching the afterlife; as tools to manage cities, nations, and empires; as images of environmental change; and as digitized visions of the global future.

By telling the stories behind the artifacts and those generated by them, Talking Maps reveals how each map is not just a tool for navigation but also a worldly proposal that helps us to understand who we are by describing where we are.

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Terra Incognita

Mapping the Antipodes before 1600

Alfred Hiatt

University of Chicago Press, 2008

From the age of antiquity to the Middle Ages, scholars argued about the existence of places, and perhaps peoples, beyond the world known to Europeans. But to allow for the possibility of such lands and races raised troubling questions: Was it truly impossible to reach the underside of the earth? And, if so, how could its inhabitants receive the word of God?
In Terra Incognita, Alfred Hiatt draws on sources both literary and visual to understand the appeal of the antipodes. Examining maps and diagrams, as well as evidence contained in geographical and historical works, poetry, travel narratives, and legal documents, he challenges long-standing characterizations of medieval spatiality as exclusively symbolic and religious. Instead, Hiatt finds, the idea of people on the other side of the Earth provided a potent and malleable symbol for political theorists, satirists, scholars, and poets—as well as for map makers. Terra Incognita is, in the end, the history of a non-place, of lands conjured by the scientific imagination, which nevertheless drove exploration, and which continued to shape the world map, even as they slowly vanished from it.

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Terrestrial Lessons

The Conquest of the World as Globe

Sumathi Ramaswamy

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Why and how do debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape enlightened subjectivity and secular worldliness in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a scientific instrument, and not least an educational tool for inculcating planetary consciousness.

In Terrestrial Lessons, Ramaswamy provides the first in-depth analysis of the globe’s history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era and its aftermath. Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she delineates its transformation from a thing of distinction possessed by elite men into that mass-produced commodity used in classrooms worldwide—the humble school globe. Traversing the length and breadth of British India, Terrestrial Lessons is an unconventional history of this master object of pedagogical modernity that will fascinate historians of cartography, science, and Asian studies.

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Time in Maps

From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era

Edited by Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Maps organize us in space, but they also organize us in time. Looking around the world for the last five hundred years, Time in Maps shows that today’s digital maps are only the latest effort to insert a sense of time into the spatial medium of maps. Historians Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer have assembled leading scholars to consider how maps from all over the world have depicted time in ingenious and provocative ways.

Focusing on maps created in Spanish America, Europe, the United States, and Asia, these essays take us from the Aztecs documenting the founding of Tenochtitlan, to early modern Japanese reconstructing nostalgic landscapes before Western encroachments, to nineteenth-century Americans grappling with the new concept of deep time. The book also features a defense of traditional paper maps by digital mapmaker William Rankin. With more than one hundred color maps and illustrations, Time in Maps will draw the attention of anyone interested in cartographic history.

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Trading Territories

Mapping the Early Modern World

Jerry Brotton

Reaktion Books, 1997

Trading Territories is a beautifully illustrated book that offers a new account of the status of maps and geographical knowledge in the early modern world. Focusing on how early European geographers mapped the territories of the Old World—Africa and Southeast Asia—Jerry Brotton contends that the historical preoccupation with Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World in 1492 has tended to obscure the importance of the mapping of territories that have been defined as “eastern.”

Brotton situates the rise of early modern mapping within the context of the seaborne commercial adventures of the early maritime empires—the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Ottomans, the Dutch, and the English—and explores the ways in which maps and globes were used to mediate the commercial and diplomatic disputes between these empires. Rather than the development of early maps being shaped by disinterested intellectual pursuits, Trading Territories argues that trade, diplomacy, and financial speculation played the most essential role.

“In this outstanding study of maps and mapping, Jerry Brotton reveals a dynamism in the transaction between East and West beyond anything we have previously appreciated.”—Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary, University of London

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Trail of Footprints

A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico

By Alex Hidalgo

University of Texas Press, 2019

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

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Traveling from New Spain to Mexico

Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Magali M. Carrera

Duke University Press, 2011

Antonio García Cubas’s Carta general of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country’s geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life’s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how García Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies.

From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display—such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs—signaled new ideas about spectatorship. García Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as the Atlas geográfico (1858) and the Atlas pintoresco é historico (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.

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Treasures from the Map Room

A Journey through the Bodleian Collections

Edited by Debbie Hall

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016

The Bodleian Library is home to one of the world’s largest and oldest collections of maps, with atlases, maps, and books on cartography dating back to the fourteenth century, including many that are among the most rare and historically significant.

Treasures from the Map Room publishes seventy-five extraordinary examples from this collection, housed in the Map Room at the newly renovated Weston Library. The maps reproduced in Treasures range from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Among them are the fourteenth-century Gough Map, the earliest road map of Great Britain that achieved a remarkable level of accuracy and detail for its time; fifteenth-century portolan charts intended for maritime navigation; the Selden Map of China, the earliest Chinese map to show shipping routes; and an important early map from the medieval Islamic Book of Curiosities. The book also includes a great many recent examples, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth and C. S. Lewis’s map of Narnia. Debbie Hall takes readers back in time to uncover the fascinating story of each treasure, from a map plotting outbreaks of cholera to a jigsaw map of India from the 1850s and silk escape maps carried by pilots flying missions over occupied Europe during World War II.

With lavish full-color photography and descriptions of each map’s provenance, purpose, and creation, Treasures from the Map Room is a beautiful and informative catalog of this remarkable collection.

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