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This article delves into the interplay between the political, social, and cultural context and the material conditions of governing a cartographic mission within a French territory in the northeastern Amazon. It brings to the fore the collaborative endeavors involving a spectrum of stakeholders, ranging from local knowledge to various institutions, financial and technical resources, and human and logistical support. This research aims to offer an understanding of the cartographic mission during the period of departmentalization, with a specific focus on the situated and context-specific nature of knowledge production. By scrutinizing the fieldwork and the distinct labor regimes of local members of the mission in AEF and French Guiana, along with investigating the intra-imperial circulation of epistemic practices, it examines the colonial integration of cartographers through their trajectories. In a broader context, the article underscores the pivotal role played by geographical knowledge, enriching the landscape of research on the history of cartography during the transformation of the French colonial empire. Employing an approach encompassing material and social dimensions, this study shows the intricacies inherent in colonial cartography and illuminates its implications in the post-World War II era. In doing so, it unlocks fresh avenues for comprehending the geographical and colonial dynamics that characterize this period. • Develops the history of mapping during decolonization by studying the fieldwork of geographers. • Focuses on circulation and hierarchization of European and vernacular geographical knowledge. • Compares labor regime and embodied work of go-betweens in French Guiana and AEF in 1946–1947. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development of the colonial cartography of Freetown, Sierra Leone across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography of colonial cartography has centred the surveyor and the map in the capture and control of land. This article, instead, describes colonial cartography in the accretion of a variety of forms of spatial representation created by diverse intermediaries in the colonial project. The chronology begins with the cartographic anxiety of two Colonial Office circulars in 1869 and 1871. Following this emergence of a nascent cartographic governmentality, three mappings of Freetown over a forty-year period, by an itinerant West African photographer, John Parkes Decker, a Wesleyan missionary, John Thomas Frederick Halligey, and a Freetonian photographer-entrepreneur, Alphonso Lisk-Carew, are examined. Visual analysis of the photographs, maps and postcards that were the products of these respective mapping projects shows the ideologies and ambivalences that undergirded these representations of the city. At once, following the processes through which this visual material did work for the colonial state, this article shows how the cartographic governance of a segregating colonial Freetown was produced in the entanglements of geographic knowledges. • Traces cartographic anxiety in Sierra Leone from two Colonial Office circulars. • Examines how photographs, maps and postcards were used in Freetown's cartography. • Folds the history of photography into the history of cartography. • Outlines how cartography did work for segregationist colonial urban governance. • Argues that cartography was produced in the entangled knowledges of intermediaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew Herbertson constructed a framework for comprehending and categorising climate and its interrelations: natural regions. Along with a large circle of students and collaborators, Herbertson promoted natural regions as the conceptual keystone for geographical teaching and research. This article shows how natural regions theory conceived of climate as an object that was differently defined in different academic disciplines. Geography's climate, according to Herbertson and his supporters, was defined by its relations with other spatially distributed phenomena rather than being the quantifiable and isolable entity of modern climatology. Building on recent work in the history of cartography foregrounding map use and reception, the article also argues that natural regions were products of particular modes of map reading, comparison, and synthesis. Although maps were arguably the most influential medium for communicating natural regions, they also proved limited as bearers of the multiscalar version of climate that Herbertson and his successors sought to convey. Finally, the article explains how natural regions and associated conceptions of climate came to be sidelined in the mid-twentieth century as geographers foregrounded human agency in region formation and adopted climatology's definitions and analytical tools. Revisiting the life and death of theories of natural regions illuminates the contested significance of climate in the discipline of geography, and contributes to ongoing efforts to pluralise the history of climate sciences. • Climate was a mutable concept in British geography in the early twentieth century. • Maps were key tools for conceptualising and communicating what climate is and does. • Geographical research and teaching conceived of climate differently to modern climate science. • Pluralising past sciences of climate is a significant task for geographers in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on indigenous maps collected in British Burma by James George Scott (1851–1935) and kept at the Cambridge University Library, this paper offers an alternative history of the first years of British colonisation in Upper Burma in the 1880s and 1890s. The entangled scripts – Chinese characters, Shan, Burmese and English – as well as the materiality and the visual codes of these documents bring into view forms of contact that did not last long. Contextualising these maps with other kinds of sources – including Scott's diaries and administrative reports – allows us to reconstruct their production as part of processes of intelligence gathering and frontier settlement. By tracing the more or less willing role of Burmese clerks, notables, guides and interpreters in the cartographic processes implemented by the English on the ground, we can reintroduce these actors into a history of cartography that has long been Eurocentric. Doing so reveals how the British had to rely on indigenous knowledge to control a territory quite unknown to them during the early years of colonisation. • Traces the constitution of the Scott collection in the late nineteenth century. • Considers looted or commissioned Burmese and Shan maps in the early colonial period. • Explores the colonial encounter in British Burma through indigenous mapping. • Investigates intelligence gathering and frontier settlement as situations of encounter. • Demonstrates how degrees of commensurability were achieved through indigenous mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of cartography in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire has been dominated by accounts of the military, academic establishments and elite male intellectuals. This article seeks to provide a corrective to this tendency by highlighting the involvement of women in cartography in the home and print workshops. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources, the article traces the role of women in the process of making the Ethnological-Geographical Atlas of Present and Prehistoric Latvi a (1892), from Martha Bielenstein's drawing of the manuscript maps in the Bielenstein family home in the Baltic provinces to the female print workers at A. Il'in's Cartographic Establishment in St. Petersburg. The article builds on recent research on women and cartography to argue that mapmaking was a far more widespread socioeconomic activity in imperial Russia than previously thought and permeated family and working lives. The research findings contribute to our knowledge of the impact of traditional gender roles on cartographic labour and geographies of map production in late imperial Russia. • Reconstructs the involvement of women in map-making in late imperial Russia. • Explores the processes of making maps in domestic and commercial settings. • Traces the circulation of geographical knowledge and maps. • Introduces the biography of Martha Bielenstein, draughtswoman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution and extent of detached gardens in a sample of ten English provincial towns were examined for the eighteenth century, through cartographic analysis and the construction of GIS-generated zones parallel to the urban fence. The study revealed that detached gardens formed a distinct and abundant feature in the urban fringe, in particular within two hundred metres of the built-up area. A longitudinal case study of the processes of plot transformation in Shrewsbury, based on maps from 1830 to 1940, indicated that a reduction in provision of detached gardens was linked to booms in the house building cycle, while periods of increased provision in the form of urban allotments were occasioned by national emergencies. The system of provision was largely profit-motivated and it disintegrated as towns expanded in the middle and late nineteenth century. Garden ground provided the prime location for housing and an awareness of its morphological frame is essential for an understanding of expansion from the urban core. It is suggested that urban morphologists have neglected detached gardens in their attempts to develop models of urban land transformation using the concept of the fringe belt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Clason's self-help essays on achieving financial independence became accepted household wisdom to millions of Americans between 1925 and 1950. Less well known is Clason's legacy in building the largest commercial map company west of Chicago between 1903 and 1931. In his earlier life as a Denver-based map publisher and booster of western economic development, Clason produced millions of road maps, state maps, city maps, promotional circulars and maps for mining companies, land companies, and state and local governments. This paper explores how Clason's earlier career as a cartographer and map publisher reflected the same economic principles he made nationally famous in his later essays about saving money and building capital. I suggest that Clason's maps successfully blended multiple and distinctive genres of commercial mapping, forming a powerful cartographic narrative focused on promoting development in the West that reflected his own ideology oriented around a belief in progress, high modernism, and the merits of individual effort within a largely capitalistic economic system. I examine the strategic partnerships and business relationships Clason forged with private companies and state institutions and how textual and visual material within Clason's maps communicated enduring ideas about the West's economic potential and regional character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, researchers have rediscovered the important cartographic collection of Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Charles Perron (1837-1909), containing more than 10,000 maps of all kinds from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including several reproductions of early maps from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This paper explores the contribution of these two geographers to the history of cartography as a critical discipline, analyzing the construction of the Reclus-Perron cartographic collection. It considers examples of the social and political uses of the collection at the beginning of the twentieth century within the Cartographic Museum of Geneva (1907-1922). These materials provided the basis for an original social interpretation of the history of cartography as a critical discipline endowed with a social utility, as well as an opportunity to explore a different way of conceiving maps and geography, diverging from the uncritical hagiographies of geographical discoveries and cartographic accuracy which were typical of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a little-known work of Egnazio Danti, author of the Vatican Gallery of Maps. The Palata map (1579) is a large-scale representation of the estate of a noble family from Bologna, placed in the lowlands between the city and the borders with the Este Duchy. The map was realized during Danti's stay in Bologna, after his Florence period, when he drew the maps in the Sala della Guardaroba Nuova in Palazzo Vecchio, and before his transfer to Rome at the service of Pope Gregorio XIII. The Palata estate is one of the land investments of the Pepoli nobility: they improved their properties in the lowlands between Bologna and Ferrara through deforestation and land reclamation, as other noble families. The map is preceded by a sketchbook where Danti drew villages, castles, villas, churches and mills during a month of land surveying works in the Bolognese territory, thus illustrating the relationship between natural elements, settlements and road networks. The sketchbook reveals also the method and the technical instruments employed by the author in his work before and after this period. The Palata map shows the troubled relationships between the estate, the other aristocratic properties and the lands managed by rural communities and also highlights the significant role of land ownership and its positive characteristics at a time when it was clearly expanding in the territory of Bologna. The map, which is connected with other Danti works in Florence and in Rome, serves also another function: the glorification of Pepoli family and exhibition of its political and economic value within the Papal State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spiral reliefs of the Column of Trajan at Rome present the narrative of the Dacian Wars upon a continuous and elongated cartographic landscape, in which a wealth of land forms, including mountains, rivers, streams, springs, and forests serve not only as a setting of human actions, but become elements of the narrative in themselves, as they yield to the relentless efforts of Trajan and his army and engineers. In depicting the campaigns, the reliefs celebrate to a remarkable degree the military engineers and agrimensores (surveyors) who transformed the land as they cleared, measured, and built during the wars. In a circuit from participation in the historical events to their commemoration, the work of these surveyors ultimately contributed to the design of the Column and the stylistic choices of the Column reliefs themselves. Not only the subjects, but the innovative spiral format and the mode of depiction of the Reliefs are indebted in part to the conventions of cartographic practice, while the conceptual framework within which the column's topographic depictions communicate their ideological freight is tied to traditions of ancient geography. Writers such as Strabo, Pliny and Dio Cassius, while providing inconclusive evidence on the locations of topography in the Reliefs, point to the worldview they express: civilizing, imperial, scopic, rational, organizing, controlling nature. This essay examines the Column reliefs as embedded in wider topographical and geographical traditions during Trajan's reign and in Roman antiquity, and proposes some new avenues for understanding the reliefs in these terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of British geographical work in Central Asia (Persia and Afghanistan) in a period when Britain was concerned about a region which lay between Europe and Enlightenment on the one hand, and her Indian colonies, the uncertainties of Asia and the imperial designs of France and Russia on the other. The paper explores the connections between geography, diplomacy and colonial knowledge and demonstrates how the mapping and geographical study of Central Asia was a central feature of British colonial ambitions and of Enlightenment conceptual reasoning, in illuminating the ways in which 'ancient' and 'modern' geography was at work in this politically core yet geographically 'marginal' space, the paper highlights the complexities intrinsic to the making of geography and of empire in a region until now neglected in modern historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: By examining the spatial practices of Mosquito Indians, this paper contends that colonial maps reflect the activities of colonized peoples. Situated between the Spanish and British empires in eastern Central America, the Mosquito carved out an independent kingdom for themselves between 1629 and 1779, and far beyond. My argument is that many period maps respond to, and re-present, Mosquito spatial practices. I define a spatial practice as any political feat, economic activity, forceful claim, or social performance that asserts and demonstrates authority over people and space. Through a chronological and thematic reconstruction of primary documents, my objective is to show that colonial subjects in general, and the Mosquito in particular, can and do contribute to their own spatialized representations through their actions and discourses. Without Mosquito spatial practices, there would have been no Mosquitia to map, only some other place. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on the 15th International Conference of Historical Geographers (ICHG) held August 6-10, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic. The author discusses papers presented at the meeting on topics including historical climatology and climate history, historical cartography, and cultural-historical themes of heritage, religion, and nationalism.

Information about several papers discussed at the 2011 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference entitled "New imperial geographies?" is presented. Topics include the response of the British Empire to Catholic missionaries in Africa, the importance of imperial maps to the administration of British colonies, and cross-cultural communication in the history of science. The conference featured several historical geographers including Mike Heffernan, Tomas Frederikson, and Gerry Reams.