Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity

While cartography, historically, is a privileged instrument of thought, imagination, research and production of geography, within International Relations, maps and cartography have only begun to be studied. Jordan Branch says that mapping ‘shapes the conditions of possibility of how actors conceive space, territory, and political authority’ (2014, 41). As such, ‘maps, like theories, shape our understanding of the world by highlighting – and obscuring – particular spatial and social features’ (Branch 2014, 36). This approach focuses mainly on the governance effects of cartography. An alter- native position reconstructs instead how transformations in European cartog- raphy between the fifteenth and seventeenth century created new imaginaries of space – and the idea of territory itself (Strandsbjerg 2010; see also Elden 2013). This book continues on that tradition and focuses on the processes of production and translation of maps, and the epistemological analysis of the imaginaries of connectivity they depict, in an attempt to reveal their contribu- tion to the making of empire