Mathematical cosmography and the social ideology of British cartography, 1780–1820

Abstract

The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constitute a period of profound significance for the history of modern Western cartography. New topographical surveys for the state, the burgeoning literacy of urban populations, and the increased demand for cartography resulting from agricultural improvements and the industrial revolution, combined with the introduction of lithography, allowed modern cartography's cultural image to be firmly established. From this period dates the widespread acceptance that cartography is an empirical, objective, and unproblematic science concerned only with the presentation of geographic information. Brian Harley referred to this cultural image as the illusion of cartographic mimesis; Denis Wood and John Fels call it the cartographic myth.' This paper explores the eighteenth-century definition of cartography as an intellectual activity, a definition which underlies the map's modern cultural image. I begin with the manner in which Enlightenment scholars positioned the map at the heart of 'mathematical cosmography', the broad conceptual fusion of astronomy, geography, and their point of contact, cartography.2 (I accordingly use 'mathematical cosmography' to refer to all mapmaking activities in their broadest intellectual construction.) Indeed, this positioning reflected the more general location of the map and the mapmaking process (singularly conceived) as tropes of knowledge and knowledge-production. I then turn to the case of Britain in the decades on either side of 1800 to show how this ideal intellectual construction of cartography depended on, and was shaped by, the system of state patronage within which mapmakers worked. Cartography's image as an intellectually coherent discipline was thus an illusion created by the period's social ideology.