The Sustainability of Geological Mapmaking: The Case of the Geological Survey of Great Britain

Abstract

Henry De la Beche's leadership of the Geological Survey of Great Britain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century led to the establishment of a number of key institutions which ensured the Survey of survival beyond the initial phase of geological mapmaking. Considered as a finite activity serving only to fix on paper the spatial distribution of an unchanging physical resource, geological mapmaking alone was never a secure basis for institutional or disciplinary development. The actions taken by De la Beche in the 1830s and 1840s, at a time when public and politicians alike were suspicious of government-funded science, were echoed 150 years later by successors who served governments with similar doubts about non-commercial scientific activity. Whether buried within an empire of public institutions, illuminated in museum collections which spoke of utilitarian value, or conceptualised as an income-generating database of rare data, the continuation of geological mapmaking in Britain relied upon a relationship to, and relevance for, a wider world of politics and practice. Seen in the long view, the British Geological Survey demonstrates that a nation can only make and re-make geological maps if that activity can be submerged within, or repackaged as, a new strategically-valued socio-economic initiative.