Abstract/Résumé

Abstract

This study explores the work of J.B. Harley (1932–1991), the British historical geographer and historian of cartography whose advocacy of a cultural paradigm for map studies has been widely influential across the humanities and social sciences. It examines his entire intellectual career: his doctoral studies in the historical geography of medieval England in the 1950s; his empiricist map analyses and cartographic studies in the 1960s; his first excursions in theory in studying map use in the 1970s; his work with David Woodward on The History of Cartography; and his forceful, compelling polemic for a post-structuralist study of cartography in the 1980s. Harley especially sought to create an intellectual identity for the field, first by means of academic cartography's communication models, supplemented by the art historical methodology of iconography, and subsequently by means of Michel Foucault's concept of power/knowledge and the analysis of maps as texts. This study accordingly provides a history of the late-twentieth-century paradigm shift in Anglo-American cartographic history, of the field's interrelations with the disciplines of human geography (including historical geography) and cartography, and of its own pretensions to disciplinary autonomy.