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This volume considers consider the roles mapping has played in the passage from colony to nation—or, from dependent to independent state. The eight contributions, including a synoptic first chapter and seven case studies of mapping and decolonization in Latin America, Africa, and Asia from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, concern the engagement of mapping in the long and clearly unfinished process of decolonization and the parallel process of nation building from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. In general, decolonization involves practices by which colonized peoples become more engaged or reengaged in mapping their own spaces and territories. But the cartographic record shows that, in mapping their new states, decolonizing communities distinguish themselves from their former colonizers and consolidate new identities only gradually and incompletely. Drawing on examples of administrative and official cartography, iconic and propagandistic mapping, popular and educational genres, and art, the contributions to this volume show that decolonizing the map of new nation-states is never a singular process. The dominance of colonial and former colonial elites, creoles (criollos), and intermediaries in the mapping of new states is complicated by ideological conflicts, countermapping, social movements, and democratization.

While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.

About a millennium ago, sometime between 1020 and 1050, in Cairo, a large illustrated book on the heavens and the Earth was completed. Modern scholars were unaware of its existence until its recent ‘discovery’ and acquisition in 2002 by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. It is today referred to as The Book of Curiosities, and it contains a remarkable series of early maps and astronomical diagrams, most of which are unparalleled in any Greek, Latin or Arabic material. The treatise is composed of two parts. The first is on the heavens, moving the reader from the outermost sphere of the stars through the spheres of the five planets visible to the naked eye down to the sub-lunar world of winds and comets. The second part is on the Earth, beginning with calculation of the Earth’s circumference, then moving to maps of the inhabited world, islands of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and major lakes and rivers of the world, ending with strange plants and animals inhabiting the Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs examines how the discovery of this manuscript contributes to the history of cartography, to the history of astronomy and astrology, and to our knowledge of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean networks of communication. It includes new perspectives on the history of maritime charts before the age of the portolans, on the patterns of Mediterranean travel and trade before the Crusades, and on Fatimid–Ismaʿili missionary networks in East Africa and the Indus Valley.

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, maps are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. It is these very characteristics, however, that give maps their importance in understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world and that give historical maps especially the power to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature over time. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature Across the Americas. Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for the greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This interdisciplinary volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between historical maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas, from sixteenth-century indigenous cartography in Mexico to the mapping of American forests in the United States during the early conservation years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There are hundreds of cartographic images scattered throughout the medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of extant copies produced in a variety of locales across the Islamic world for eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval Islamic cartographic visions. This book examines the rich corpus of Islamic maps to show that they can be read as iconographic representations of the way medieval Muslims perceived their world and that, just like text, they can be analyzed to reveal insights into the history of the period in which they were constructed. In these maps we see images informed by the work of other societies, by myth and religious belief, and by physical reality. This work disentangles the Islamic maps, traces their inception and evolution and reveals their picture cycles. It shows how these maps can be deconstructed to reveal the identities of their constructors, painters, and patrons. This book draws on complex debates in the realms of art history, history of science, and world history of cartography, as well as the philosophy of aesthetics, symbolic anthropology, and visual theory. It explores the applicability of newer and more innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history. The author aims to bring Middle Eastern maps into the orbit of modern and postmodern theoretical paradigms. This is achieved through a series of analytical lenses that present alternate ways of viewing Islamic maps.

This book, The Mysteries of the “Marco Polo” Maps, introduces the reader to a very curious collection of little-known maps relating to the voyages of Marco Polo. As far as history tells us, Marco Polo himself never drew any maps recording his travels to the east. Maps such as the 1375 Catalan Atlas use information from the famous Polo narrative in the depiction of Asia, but it does not seem that this or other such cartographic works were based on works that Marco Polo might have brought back. Fra Mauro’s fifteenth-century world map uses Marco Polo’s toponyms, and the Venetian historian, diplomat, geographer, and writer Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557) claimed that this work was a copy of one brought back from China by Marco Polo, but gave no evidence for his claim. In this new book, however, the reader can explore maps that may suggest new leads in the case—with a detailed look at these obscure but fascinating materials, some fourteen maps and related documents currently held in a private collection (with one at the Library of Congress). The text takes the reader of a broad adventure, with encounters in many areas of knowledge—from early exploration in Asia to medieval Italian history, and from tales of the remote reaches of the northern Pacific Ocean to ancient Chinese legends. This is an exciting exploration of knowledge, delving into old manuscripts and deciphering texts to find clues as to the origin of these mysterious maps.

This book recounts the history of a genre, the city portrait, through imagery of Rome. Among the most popular categories of early modern print culture, the city portrait was also one of the most varied, encompassing maps, bird’s-eye views, and other forms of urban representation. Through an exploration of seminal works dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this book interweaves the story of this genre with that of Rome itself, addressing the key figures and specific contexts that shaped each image. Scholars, artists, architects, and engineers who shared a fascination with Rome’s ruins were spurred to develop new graphic modes for depicting the city. The resulting maps delicately balanced measured and pictorial forms of representation, past and present, realism and idealism. Portraits of Rome became canvases for documenting the rapid-fire urban changes initiated by a series of Renaissance and Baroque popes, for projecting ideas about the city’s current and future state, and for romanticizing, aggrandizing, or marginalizing its tangible signs of antiquity—or, for that matter, modernity.