“The Imperial Map”: The 15th Nebenzahl Lectures
Jim Akerman

On October 7–9 the Newberry staged the fifteenth series of its Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography. The theme this year was “The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire.” Over the three days of the symposium our audience of scholars and members of the general public heard six lectures outlining the complicated relationship between imperialism and mapping in a variety of geographical settings from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries.

“The Imperial Map” was dedicated to the memory of David Woodward, the first director of the Smith Center (see p. 3), who died on 25 August 2004. Dr. Woodward attended the very first Nebenzahl Lectures in 1966 when he was still a graduate student and had never missed one since. He organized the second (1970) through the sixth (1980) series, securing for the Lectures the international scholarly reputation they now enjoy. It seemed fitting to open this series with a memorial ceremony, during which Ken Nebenzahl, Bob Karrow, the Newberry’s Curator of Special Collections and Curator of Maps, and Jim Akerman, the current director of the Smith Center, offered personal recollections of David and reflected on his contributions to the history of cartography and to the Newberry Library.

It was also fitting that the opening lecture was delivered by one of David’s students, Dr. Matthew Edney (Osher Map Library and Departments of Geography-Anthropology and American & New England Studies, University of Southern Maine). Dr. Edney’s talk, “The Irony of Imperial Cartography,” sketched out a framework for the proceedings by pondering whether and how the enterprise of imperial mapping can be defined historically, geographically, and socially. Noting that the series’ interest in imperial mapping emerges from the broad swelling of interest among map scholars in “the intersections between cartography and political power,” Edney argued that it is not possible to define “imperial mapping” as a distinct category of political cartography on the basis of cartographic characteristics or content alone. Recent scholarship widely supports the notion that cartography is an important means by which modern nation-states and their citizens have conducted and defined themselves. Edney asked, is “imperial cartography” a category of “state cartography,” or is it something distinct that deserves study as such? If so, what are its characteristics? Edney suggested that the distinction lies in the contexts in which maps are made and (more importantly) used. Briefly put, “the idea of the ‘state’ as a unified entity…is a creation of cartographic discourses which encompass the inhabitants…of the lands being mapped….On the other hand, the idea of ‘empire’ is constructed through cartographic discourses which represent a territory for the benefit of one group but which exclude the inhabitants of the territories that are represented.” Edney elaborated this argument with examples drawn from around the world spanning the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.

Friday was a full day, with two lectures each in the morning and afternoon. Dr. Valerie Kivelson (Department of History, University of Michigan) opened the morning session with an exploration of the confluence of religion and political ideology reflected in the Russian mapping of Siberia in the early modern period. In her talk, “‘Exalted and Glorified to the Ends of the Earth’: Christianity and Colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Russian Siberia,” Dr. Kivelson argued that, as in many other imperial contexts, “Russian…conquerors and colonizers understood their presence in the Siberian taiga and tundra, mountains, deserts, and wastelands, as serving a divine purpose, contributing to the glorification of God and the spread of Christianity.” Yet Russians were notably less concerned with converting conquered peoples to their Orthodox faith than other Christian powers; instead they regarded the fealty of non-Christian peoples to the Tsar as evidence of the superiority of Christianity and of divine approval of the Russian state. Early Russian mapping of Siberia consequently did not hide or erase the presence of native peoples, as often happens on imperial maps. Rather, they celebrated the diversity of the conquered lands, depicting the landscape as a “patchwork” of native peoples, punctuated here and there by towns, churches, fortifications that ruled and managed native peoples without either fully destroying or assimilating them.

We are accustomed to thinking that imperialism is essentially a European and, by extension, an American phenomenon. In the second lecture of the morning, “Contending Cartographic Claims: The Qing Empire in Manchu, Chinese, and European Maps,” Dr. Laura Hostetler (Department of History, University of Illinois-Chicago) reminded the audience that early modern China was an imperial state as well. In fact, she argued that what has become the normalized territorial identity of China is in fact a relatively new geographical concept, largely propagated both at home and in the West by maps created by the early Manchu, or Qing, emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The focal point of Dr. Hostetler’s talk was an atlas of the growing Qing Empire, surveyed for the Kangxi Emperor by Jesuit missionaries and subsequently printed in both Chinese and European versions during the early eighteenth century.

After a break for lunch, The Imperial Map continued with a talk by Dr. Neil Safier (Department of History, University of Michigan). Dr. Safier’s lecture, “The Confines of the Captaincy: Boundary-Lines, Ethnographic Landscapes, and the Limits of Imperial Cartography in Eighteenth-Century Iberoamerica,” examined the way in which native groups in Portuguese Brazil were represented and described in maps and other geographic and ethnographic materials created by colonial officials. Safier observed that “ethnonyms” (the names of native peoples communities) were often missing in Portuguese colonial maps in places we might expect to find them. Other kinds of written and tabular materials extensively “mapped” these groups. Safier found that the absence of ethnonyms on maps did not imply the erasure or marginalization of these groups, but instead pointed to the colonizer’s realization that maps as we understand them were poorly suited to the representation of these often mobile communities.

The final paper of the day was presented by Dr. Graham Burnett (Department of History, Princeton University). Dr. Burnett’s lecture, “‘Empires of Science and Commerce’: Whalers, Wilkes, and U.S. Sea-Charting in the Age of Sail,” focused on the surveying and cartographic work of the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42 commanded by Charles Wilkes. The so-called Wilkes Expedition was originally conceived “with the intention of consolidating and extending the harbors and waters available to U.S. whale ships” in the Pacific Ocean. As the first major enterprise sponsored by the U.S. Navy in the Pacific the expedition marked the emergence of the United States as a Pacific power. The expedition’s broad and overtly imperial motives, Burnett argued, were underpinned by the hydrographic surveys that formed the core of its military mission. Burnett drew a broad analogy between the strict discipline surveyors were expected to follow in recording and reporting data and the disciplinary effect the act of surveying had upon native populations.

“The Imperial Map” concluded on Saturday morning. The final lecture by Dr. Michael Heffernan (School of Geography, University of Nottingham) examined the use of cartography by journalists at the height of European imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In “Maps for the Masses: Cartography, Empire, and the Newspaper Press in Britain and France, 1890–1930,” Dr. Heffernan noted that technological developments during the later nineteenth century substantially enhanced the ability of daily and weekly newspapers in Western Europe to publish graphics, including maps, as accompaniments to news stories. A golden age of sorts for journalistic cartography ensued which coincided with the apogee of the global empires of Britain and France. Maps, Heffernan argued, played an important role in reporting, explaining, and justifying developments on the world stage to an increasingly literate general public, upon whose support British and French imperial enterprises depended. In this respect, cartographic journalism was particularly important during World War I, when maps were used both to clarify and promote geopolitical and strategic goals and to describe specific battles and trace the movements of front lines. The morning session and the lectures closed with an extended discussion.

The Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography were established in 1966 and are generously supported by Ken and Jossy Nebenzahl. We wish to thank several members of the Chicago Map Society who volunteered to help with logistics. The Society also sponsored the reception that followed the proceedings on Thursday night. The publisher of the collected Nebenzahl Lectures, the University of Chicago Press, supported a second reception on Friday evening. As always, we are grateful for this support.

We expect the sixteenth series of the Nebenzahl Lectures to be held in Fall 2007.