Trading places: Accumulation as mediation in French ministry map depots, 1798–1810

Abstract

During the French Revolution, the comparative geographer Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage lost his patron, his job, and (most importantly) his access to source materials. Working for ministry map depots, however, he was able to forge new alliances and, by acting as a broker between different actors and interests, mobilize new networks of accumulation inside France and across central and eastern Europe. In these new centers of accumulation, Barbié translated the meanings and the significance of the objects he collected to fit the interests of the different constituencies in his network: including French politicians, diplomats and consuls, Greek merchants and Enlightenment scholars. The strength of the ‘mobiles’ he collected was their mutability, the ease with which they could be repurposed. Such translations shifted Barbié’s own assumptions about the ways in which old and new information could be combined both in his work for the government and in his private antiquarian scholarship.