Abstract
The construction and destruction of empire has been, from the beginning, a problem of human, political, economic and physical geography. Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the undertaking of a mapping project of unprecedented scale in the British Empire, and one whose legacy remains in dispute to the present day. On the one hand, the mapping of Ireland has been seen as of a kind with the often violent military surveying of all colonies; on the other, it has been lauded as the beginning of a genuine, if government-sponsored, attempt to remember and recover the past. This essay seeks to offer a new way to think about the survey of Ireland by interrogating the poetry of one of the employees of the Ordnance Survey, James Clarence Mangan, suggesting that his translations of Gaelic ruin poems in particular offer a nuanced vision of the dialectic between loss and preservation that subtends the work of mapmaking. It also draws on recent developments in the theorization of colonial archives to argue for a more subtle way of understanding the nature of mapping in Ireland, which may help to modulate received ideas about colonial mapping practices in general.
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