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Capitalism and Cartography examines how map publication and dissemination coincided with and was part of the rise of the Dutch Republic as a preeminent capitalist nation in the early modern global world-system. Printed maps both reflected and reinforced an episteme that integrated humanist conceptions of individual virtue with the concept of the nation-state and modern capitalism. This book explores how printed Dutch maps of their Atlantic territories helped rationalize the global expansion of the Dutch during their so-called Golden Age. It is argued that picturing underscored the legal, political, and economic systems of Dutch imperial hegemony. These early printed Dutch maps are presented as historical case studies of how authorized media perpetuated and promoted modern state capitalism. Pictures—in maps and books—showed the boundaries, commodities, and topographical details that the publisher, state-sponsored corporate bodies, and the merchant and governing elite deemed significant. Those with political and economic capital reinforced their power and values in the cultural sphere pictorially, and in the intellectual sphere in historical and legal texts. These two domains combined in printed maps by Amsterdam publishers, especially Claes Jansz Visscher. The maps of Dutch territories in North and South America and land reclamation projects in the Netherlands indicate how print media was used both to increase investment and to project a common narrative of national unity in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The period between the French Revolution and the Second World War saw an unprecedented proliferation of mapmaking and map reading across modern European society. This book explores the “age of cartophilia” through the story of mapmaking in the disputed French-German borderland of Alsace-Lorraine. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French and Germans claimed Alsace-Lorraine as part of their national territories, fighting several bloody wars with each other that resulted in four changes to the borderland’s nationality. In the process, the contested territory became a mapmaker’s laboratory, a place subjected to multiple visual interpretations and competing topographies. The cartographers that mapped Alsace-Lorraine at the height of its nationalist conflict were not the people that we might expect. When we typically think of a border surveyor, we picture a man in a military uniform positioning border markers onto land with the help of scientific instruments. Cartophilia challenges this stereotypical image of a border surveyor. It demonstrates that Alsace-Lorraine’s mapmakers were people from all walks of life, including linguists, ethnographers, historians, priests, and schoolteachers. Empowered by their access to affordable new printing technologies and motivated by patriotic ideals, these “popular mapmakers” re-defined the meaning and purpose of European borders during the age of nationalism.

Hitler’s Geographies aims to respond to the growing interest in the current academic literature for a comprehensive investigation of the spatial imaginations of the Nazi regime and of the actual geographies that it designed and implemented through its thirteen years of grand plans, colonization, exploitation and genocide. Geographers and spatial planners played a key role in the Nazi project, and Nazi ideology was permeated by a broad spatial vision of the Reich and its territories, supported by a number of key spatial concepts, like those of Lebensraum, Grossraum, Farther East and Geopolitik, to name but a few. This book thus intends to provide an overview of how recent research in geography and related disciplines has approached the question of the spatialities of Hitlerism and how these have affected geopolitical projections and biopolitical practices ‘in place’. A geographical perspective on the spatialities of the Third Reich is much needed: this book aims at illustrating this perspective in an accessible way for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars of the Third Reich, while at the same proposing a theoretical approach to ‘space’ that is well established in the discipline of human geography and widely recognized in interdisciplinary debates. In addition, this book, while providing a broader geographical analysis of some key Nazi spatial projections and fantasies, at the same time insists in many of its chapters on the links between these and Nazi biopolitics.

The Iron Curtain did not exist. Instead, it comprised multiple regional segments, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. The first cultural studies account of the border’s landscape, The Icon Curtain straddles the woods between Czechoslovakia and West Germany to uncover a far-reaching genealogy of one such section and debunk the stereotype of the unprecedented mid-twentieth-century partition. The book transports the reader to the western edge of the lore-filled Bohemian Forest—one of Europe’s oldest borderlands. There, between the 1950s and 1980s, West German locals and Sudeten German expellee newcomers shaped a civilian rampart, the “prayer wall.” The book outlines the stages in the emergence of this unexplored sequence of new and repurposed pilgrimage chapels, lookout towers, and monuments. It examines how the “prayer wall” could bundle two long-standing German obsessions—forest and border—and bring this conjunction to bear on perceptions of the changing Cold War landscape. In this setting, the book demonstrates the barrier’s telltale symbols, barbed wire, and watchtowers, gave way to a whole other set of icons. Vandalized religious statues from the Eastern bloc, dislocated tourist landmarks, snapshots of travellers peering into the distance, and poems entitled simply “At the Border” helped civilians assimilate rupture and situate themselves vis-à-vis the conflict’s exigencies. The pivot of their efforts, the Icon Curtain, hinged not on real events but on widely diffused realist representations.

The book narrates the lives of five cartographers active in the early 20th century and uses records of their correspondence along historical research about the period to substantiate an analysis of the political and personal considerations that shaped the science of mapmaking. The cartographers worked with and made maps of East Central Europe before, throughout, and after World War I, driven onward to solidify their status and worth in strange frontiers after the tumultuous precursors and events of the Great War scattered them across national boundaries. Their projects were informed by nationalism, classic desires for romance and power, anti-Semitism, a thirst for recognition as rational and proper, and many other complex considerations, all of which are immortalized through the maps and letters of the five men.

This book looks at mountains from a very original perspective, focusing on political and scientific imaginaries of mountains throughout the world. It aims to study the processes through which modern societies and states "make" mountains. In other words, it focuses on the social processes at work in the identification, the qualification, and the transformation of mountains. These processes are considered as political processes, as they promote vision of what these mountain areas and populations should be. The book shows, through numerous and worldwide case studies running through the last three centuries, that the meanings of mountains have been varying a lot according contexts (times and places). Numerous political projects have been projected onto these areas: "natural borders", national emblems, exploitation of the resources located in the highlands, promotion of sustainable development policies, etc. For all these various and sometimes competing projects, there is a specific way to conceive and describe mountains. This books pays great attention to the inhabitants, especially when designated as "mountaineers", either in a positive way, like as guardians of the traditions or in a negative way, like when they are qualified as backwards communities. It starts from the deep renewal of the notion of the mountain in the Western culture at the time of Enlightment, describes the social and political effects on this renewal in Europe and North America. Then, it explains how this model was transferred to the rest of the world, through colonization and globalization, and interfered with existing local visions.

This book tells the history of scientific efforts to understand and manage rangelands—the grasslands, shrublands, savannas, tundra, steppe and deserts that comprise some two-fifths of Earth’s land surface. Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the United States Forest Service employed scientists in hopes of rapidly discovering ways to heal damage from overgrazing, maximize the production of forage and livestock, and resolve conflicts about the use of public lands. But the scale and variability of rangelands defied the logics of capital, the state and science alike. Exterminating rodents and predators, suppressing wildfire, and assigning carrying capacities to fenced areas of rangelands were all imposed on western public lands for political and economic reasons, with science serving to justify these measures as apolitical and “natural.” Frederic Clements’ theory of plant succession dominated the discipline for most of the twentieth century, even as early range scientists recognized its flaws and attempted to voice their objections. Perennial conflicts between US federal land management agencies, ranchers, and environmentalists reflect their shared adherence to Clementsian ideas, which were displaced among scientists only after the Western Range model failed, repeatedly and conspicuously, in pastoral development projects in the Third World. Across the West today, community-based conservation initiatives suggest the promise of more collaborative, multi-scaled approaches to managing rangelands.

Worldly Consumers explores the growing availability of maps to private consumers in sixteenth-century Italy and argues that maps became a central tool in the effort to construct an identity and impress one’s neighbors. This book examines the expanding market for maps as consumer goods, and reconstructs the value of Renaissance maps to their buyers using a variety of sources, including maps, household inventories, epigrams, dedications, catalogues, advice manuals, and books on geography and travel. This analysis demonstrates that individuals displayed maps in their homes as a deliberate act of self-fashioning—just as they did with paintings, sculptures, antiquities, and jewels. Yet maps were different from these other objects because the changing standards of accuracy in maps created a synonymy between image and place; this allowed map owners to use their maps as a stand-in for the depicted location. Displaying a map of a city or region thus showed one’s intimate knowledge about that place while simultaneously educating viewers. Renaissance Italians turned domestic spaces into a microcosm of larger geographical places to craft a cosmopolitan identity for themselves. Maps were valued not solely for their monetary cost or the information they contained, but for the cultural capital that accrued to their owners—a new class of consumer who deliberately directed the cultural work of their maps.