An Empire on Paper: The Founding of Halifax and Conceptions of Imperial Space, 1744–55

Abstract

The founding of Halifax in 1749 was a watershed in British imperial policy. The settlement was state-funded and served political, not commercial, aims. Mapping – the creation and representation of geographic knowledge – was essential to Halifax's success because it shaped Britain's relationship to the land and subsequently influenced how Britons in the settlement interacted with each other and with resistant groups. Cartographic knowledge was never static, but instead was affected by cultural, political, and economic realities that directed the work of local commissioned surveyors like Charles Morris, and metropolitan public mapmakers like Thomas Jefferys. From 1744 to 1755, geographic imaginings of Halifax changed to address specific imperial goals: first, reconnaissance maps and surveys delimited boundaries and provided data; second, early settlement geographic knowledge established Britain's claim to the Halifax region by controlling the Native presence and emphasizing British strength; and third, ‘popular’ cartography rallied support for the empire by promoting attractive imperial images among Britons. Geographic knowledge produced from the Halifax settlement indicates that spatial information was Janus-faced: maps and reports negotiated a fine line between value-free geographic information and imperially favourable geographic imaginations. In each case mapping and its cartographic evidence were key independent variables in the socio-political organization of power that situated early modern Canada in a British Atlantic world.