Authorizing geographical knowledge: John Arrowsmith, mapmaking and the mid nineteenth-century British Empire

Abstract

This article examines how the prominent mapmaker, engraver and publisher John Arrowsmith (1790–1873) functioned as a geographical authority in the mid nineteenth-century British Empire. Through previously unexamined archival material I analyse Arrowsmith’s close relationship with the Colonial Office and consider his semi-official position as a mapmaker to the British Empire. I analyse Arrowsmith’s cartographic credibility and the power of maps through a case study focusing on Australind, a private colonization venture targeted at Western Australia in 1840. I analyse the ‘social life’ of a map Arrowsmith supplied for the Western Australian Company largely based on explorer George Grey’s information by examining its contested epistemological status in the Australian colonies. Using literature on trust, authority and the social histories of maps, this article highlights the mutability and spatial contingency of the power of maps and their makers in imperial and colonial knowledge-making. By studying the map’s shifting position in the processes of truth-making in the metropolis and the Australian colonies I contribute to growing literature on the processual nature of maps. Importantly, I demonstrate how maps like Arrowsmith’s not only contributed to the popular imagination of empire at home but were documents of indirect agency as the British invaded and explored different parts of the world.