Maps

Abstract

Maps are artifacts that selectively link places to other kinds of things for the purpose of underwriting the reproduction (or contestation) of the social relations of power, and therefore are more readily exemplified than defined. Maps have become important comparatively recently, almost all of them having been made in the past hundred years, and their growing use parallels the rise of the modern state. Although maps were made before the rise of the modern state, they were only rarely made, appearing sparsely in cultural records everywhere in the world, and generally as facets of small-scale cosmological speculation and large-scale property control functions (a military mapping function appears uniquely early in China, and a coastal sailing function in the late middle ages in the Mediterranean basin). Maps as a way of advancing propositions about an open variety of spatial relations, at any scale, begin appearing only in the fifteenth century (in the twelfth century in China), and do not become common until the sixteenth century, when map production explodes around the world, and indigenous traditions from Japan, China, Europe, the New World, and elsewhere fuse into the synthesis we recognize today. The map’s ability to embody the abstraction of the modern state is salient.