The Mid-Victorian Perspective: A Fragmented East
The Mid-Victorian Perspective: A Fragmented East
This chapter first shows the diversity of the agendas underlying the survey of the Middle East–to-be in the mid-19th century. It examines the haphazard processes that lay behind the mapmaking. The position of fieldwork in the dynamic processes that shaped geographical imaginations is of central importance to the understanding of the cultural production of the area. It then looks into the factors and the technical restraints behind survey expeditions. It describes how the surveyors captured the topography and nomenclature of a place, how spatial knowledge was first collected and recorded before its translation into the printed authority of cartography. It also tackles the question of the interactions between the local population and British agents. It pursues one of the main lines of reasoning of this book: the dialectical elaboration of cartographic and geographical knowledge. The chapter goes on to consider one of the first systematic surveying campaigns in the region, that is, the Palestine Exploration Fund project, with a view to observing the interactions of the aforementioned processes through a case study. The last sections describe the final stages of the construction of knowledge, from mapping to mapmaking as such, from the field notes to the cartographic document.
Keywords: exploration, mapmaking, surveying, Palestine Exploration Fund, Crimean War, maps, statecraft
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