More than Just Illustrations:The Cartographic Turn in Early American History Christian J. Koot (bio) S. Max Edelson. The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2017. xvi + 464 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. Martin Brückner. The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. xvii + 350 pp. pages. Figures, notes, and index. $49.95. As British and American negotiators worked to create a peace plan that would end the American War of Independence, they had before them one of the most important British maps of the eighteenth-century: John Mitchell's Map of British and French Dominions in North America (1755). Designed to assert British claims to continental North America at the start of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), this large 4 ½ by 6 foot map's most distinctive feature is the straight lines extending westward to the map's left edge which combine with alternating color washes. In tandem, these visual devices forcefully claim the interior of North America for Britain.1 The Mitchell map figures prominently in two new books on the cartographic and geographic imagination of early America, S. Max Edelson's The New Map of Empire and Martin Brückner's The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860. These authors, however, see the Mitchell map differently. For Edelson it represents a landmark of British claims of dominion in North America and indicates how British visions for the American colonies were tied to cartographic materials. In Brückner's hands the map's geographic information is almost irrelevant. What matters is its size and where it hung: in Philadelphia's Assembly Hall. Installed in a legislative space, he argues, the map elevated discourse and encouraged civility. The contrasting ways these authors interpret the Mitchell map signals their divergent approaches. Edelson uses maps to recover the geographic dimension of British plans for empire after 1763, while Brückner is interested in asserting maps' materiality and uncovering the ways these objects helped [End Page 17] script consumers' behavior. Together these books indicate the coming of age of cartographic scholarship as it expands beyond sub-genre. In these two skilled scholars' hands, maps emerge as a complex form of evidence that can illuminate a variety of historical questions. At the heart of The New Map of Empire is an extraordinary archive of thousands of British maps the Lords Commissioners of Trade and the Plantations (the Board of Trade) commissioned in the decade following the Seven Years' War. These maps, charts, and town plans enabled administrative officials to see the expanding British Empire differently. "A capacity," Edelson writes, "that emboldened them to take command of new colonial territory directly from London in new ways—and with new purpose" (p. 7). The Board of Trade had collected maps since the 1670s as it struggled to govern an ever-shifting empire but never before systematically. The scale of Britain's victory in 1763 prompted the Lords Commissioners to launch a new General Survey of the empire with the goal of uniformly mapping the American colonies. This cartographic project aligned neatly with the new view of empire that British political economists were developing in the 1760s. This vision moved away from a coercive model and called for geographically contained colonies in North America bound closely to the West Indies and Britain through mutually beneficial trade and governmental administration. Edelson's account of the restructuring of the British Empire after 1763 is a familiar one, but he enriches it by arguing that it was accomplished as much spatially as it was administratively. Whereas earlier scholars have focused on reforms designed to gain greater bureaucratic control over the empire including the introduction of permanent military garrisons, a more robust customs office, and directly-accountable governors, Edelson finds that the Lords Commissioners planned to realize their plans cartographically. In arguing that the Board of Trade aimed to reform the empire by mapping it, Edelson is drawing on the work of a generation of map scholars who established that maps are not...
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Apr 6, 2019
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