This book comprises 17 chapters derived from new research papers presented at the 7th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, held in Oxford from 13 to 15 September 2018 and jointly organized by the ICA Commission on Topographic Mapping and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The overall conference theme was ‘Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea’. The book presents a breadth of original research undertaken by internationally recognized authors in the field of historical cartography and offers a significant contribution to the development of this growing field and to many interdisciplinary aspects of geography, history and the geographic information sciences. It is intended for researchers, teachers, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.

This book comprises 17 chapters derived from new research papers presented at the 7th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, held in Oxford from 13 to 15 September 2018 and jointly organized by the ICA Commission on Topographic Mapping and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The overall conference theme was 'Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea'. The book presents a breadth of original research undertaken by internationally recognized authors in the field of historical cartography and offers a significant contribution to the development of this growing field and to many interdisciplinary aspects of geography, history and the geographic information sciences. It is intended for researchers, teachers, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.

This book tells a compelling story about invasion, settler colonialism, and an emergent sense of identity in place, as seen through topographical and landscape images by seven fascinating artists. Their ways of imagining the Vandemonian landscape are part of a much larger story about how aesthetic forces shaped empire and colony, place and migration, and people’s lives. They remain intriguing through-lines of global significance and local meaning.

Analyzing more than 150 historical maps, this book traces the Jesuits’ significant contributions to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World. In 1540, in the wake of the tumult brought on by the Protestant Reformation, Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. The Society’s goal was to revitalize the faith of Catholics and to evangelize to non-Catholics through charity, education, and missionary work. By the end of the century, Jesuit missionaries were sent all over the world, including to South America. In addition to performing missionary and humanitarian work, Jesuits also served as cartographers and explorers under the auspices of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French crowns as they ventured into remote areas to find and evangelize to native populations. In Encounters in the New World, Mirela Altic analyzes more than 150 of their maps, most of which have never previously been published. She traces the Jesuit contribution to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World into the post-suppression period, placing it in the context of their worldwide undertakings in the fields of science and art. Altic’s analysis also shows the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into the Jesuit maps, effectively making them an expression of cross-cultural communication—even as they were tools of colonial expansion. This ambiguity, she reveals, reflects the complex relationship between missions, knowledge, and empire. Far more than just a physical survey of unknown space, Jesuit mapping of the New World was in fact the most important link to enable an exchange of ideas and cultural concepts between the Old World and the New.

This volume seeks to collectively explore how maps can be used to understand the making of European empires, how the epistemological practices embedded in them can be approached to understand European imperial space-making, and how maps can be seen as representations of imaginaries of connectivity. Rehearsing mapping’s past and its multifarious relations with European imperial orders is not merely an historical exercise to contribute to a global history of cartography. What binds the several interventions is rather an awareness that looking at a particular moment of the past with composite methodologies and interdisciplinary gazes may harbour potential discoveries on the context-embedded relations between mapping, connectivity, and European empire to which we are not yet attuned. By exploring the imaginaries of the world in the mapping of Western modern empires, the book also links to the burgeoning literature on the history of international relations and empire. The emphasis on empires serves here as an important corrigendum for IR’s state centrism and Eurocentrism and contributes to further erode the myth of Westphalia.