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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.

In this self-proclaimed Urban Age, the city is touted as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer or social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. Its fertile ground gives rise to innovations that speed society along a path of progress. Without cities, human civilization, we are led to believe, will falter and decay. Not just hyperbolic, this is celebratory by half. While Cities in an Urban Age recognizes the value and wonder of cities, it rejects this view through rose-colored glasses. Instead, it argues that the city is a cauldron for the contradictions that haunt life on planet Earth. In this real place, we find wealth juxtaposed with poverty, environmental destructiveness in tension with environmental sustainability, oligarchy pushing against democracy, and tolerance fighting defensively against the onslaught of intolerance. Taking the U.S. city as its empirical ground, this book explores the ways in which these contradictions shape daily life for those who reside there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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, 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 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.

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.

Sidewalk City re-maps public space in order to unveil contemporary spatial practices and to explore future possibilities. In the midst of historic migration and urbanization, our limited public spaces are being contested and re-conceptualized in cities around the world with innovative experiments in some places and bloody battles in others. This book uses the case of sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where a vibrant everyday urbanism takes place in flexible patterns that defy conventional conceptions of public space. The book makes three contributions to the literature: 1) It develops methods of spatial ethnography for collecting data about the spatial practices of overlooked members of the public who are embedded in local institutions in order to overcome assumptions about how space is used and conceived. 2) The book also develops visual arguments with a critical cartography primer, a progression of original maps to show how our ontology and cartographic conventions illuminate and foreclose knowledge about space. 3) The book’s spatial ethnography and critical cartography is based on applying a property rights theory framework to public space in order to integrate our understanding of both the social and physical aspects of how space is constructed and regulated in society. Using the example of a pilot pedestrian project that was developed for the city from the study’s findings, Sidewalk City discusses the potential of using maps to engage social discourse and urban planning and design institutions with new visual narratives in order to shape the social reconstruction of public space.

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.