Mapping an empire: the geographical construction of British India, 1765-1843

Abstract

The last few years have seen a remarkable explosion of interest in geography, especially in its connections with colonialism. For decades deprecated as an unimaginative, if not wholly dead, subject devoted to mere description, geography-as the study of space and place-has begun to inform research across a range of disciplines. Not surprisingly, in a way similar to recent studies in anthropology in this post-Edward Said era, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to geography's role as the handmaiden of a colonialism determined to map and measure the world it sought to control. Some of these studies are provocative, like Thongchai Winichakul's stunning Siam Mapped (1994), while others, among them Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith's edited Geography and Empire (1994), bring together essays that range across a variety of topics. In his contribution to this burgeoning literature, Matthew Edney gives us a richly textured, closely argued account of one central colonial exercise in mapping-the East India Company's endeavor to survey the extensive territories its armies had conquered in South Asia in the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries.