Maps of Empires Past

Abstract

WHAT, ONCE ENDED, MIGHT AN EMPIRE MEAN? What IS left of its map?In that Empire, the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the Empire itself an entire province. In the of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.2In Jorge Luis Borges' fable Del rigor en la ciencia (1954), the perfect Map of Empire endures a sorry fate. Judged useless (inutil) by succeeding generations, the map is abandoned to the elements, leaving only tattered Fragments [...] Sheltering an occasional Beast or Beggar in the desert (despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa, habitadas por Animales y por Mendigos). Borges' story has become something of a commonplace in scholarly works on the history of cartography, so much so that it has reached the point of banality.3 Del rigor en la ciencia has served as a sly parable on two popular themes of the last twenty years: the impossibilty of complete scientific exactitude; and the alignment of maps, territory, and political power. Itself a fragment, or a pseudo-fragment of just four sentences, this text attractively illuminates the postmodern undoing of the 'discipline of geography'. And yet, as often happens, familiarity prevents us from reading a work very closely. To begin with, rigour, on closer inspection, is a pun which recent readings of the story have somewhat flattened. The of is the product of empire: both forms of rule (regula), etymologically connected, science and empire guide, stretch, reach. And there is a third rigour at work in the text: the rigour of Time, the course of (131) which brings change but, more particularly, dissatisfaction, exposure, corrosion: processes of expansion and reduction.It is easy to forget, too, that Del rigor en la ciencia has a seventeenthcentury frame, since it is presented as a quotation from Book Four of a work entitled Viajes de varones prudentes (Travels of Praiseworthy Men), attributed to one J.A. Suarez Miranda, and allegedly published in Lerida in 1658. To that frame Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares added another. They originally published Del rigor en la ciencia under the heading Museo, introducing thereby distance of time to the uncertainty of space and the mendacity of the traveller's tale. We are invited to read within the 'museum', to adopt the role of a viewer of a specimen, knowing that the frame is in all likelihood a falsification, that this museum is one of invented footnotes. Such a position urges an interpretation of the transition from Empire, craft, and College to Fragment, Beast, and Beggar, as a parable. But this story of expanded and expended rigour is a parable of. . . what? Historians of cartography have understood Borges' narrative as a reflection on scale, on the relationship between text and territory, which it certainly is. Perhaps, though, Del rigor en la ciencia could equally be understood as a reflection on remnants, on what is left behind by empires and their maps.In the following pages I will examine three images that in different ways represent or respond to an imperial past: a sixteenth-century map of the Roman Empire; a world map from around 1300; and a twenty-first-century reworking of this medieval map by a Gujarati artist. To present such images, each from very different historical moments, runs several risks. Most obviously, there is the risk of a reductive decontextualization. It will not be possible to articulate in detail the complex circumstances of each text's production: its sources, its site of production, its readership. Nor will it be possible to explore the many connections between these images and analogous visual and verbal descriptions that crucially inform their compilation and reception. And, perhaps most unfortunate of all, by privileging these particular representations I may accomplish precisely that which I intend to critique in these pages: namely, the homogenization of empire to the extent that it becomes a unitary concept, susceptible to seamless translation and comparison across cultures. …