CARTOGRAPHY WITHOUT PROGRESS': REINTERPRETING THE NATURE AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF MAPMAKING

TLDR

Cartography’s history reflects internal changes and external interactions across multiple modes, aligning with its complex intellectual, technological, social, and cultural nature. The paper extends critiques of cartography’s empiricist assumptions to examine cartography as a practice. The authors develop a new interpretation by treating cartography as composed of distinct modes defined by cultural, social, and technological relations, and apply this framework to European mapmaking from 1500 to 1850. Cartography is a complex amalgam of modes, not a monolithic enterprise, and the supposed 18th‑century cartographic reformation is a myth arising from misreading Enlightenment mathematical cosmography.

Abstract

This paper extends the current critique of cartography's empiricist presuppositions to the nature of cartography as a practice. After exploring the relevant aspects of empiricist cartography - the manner in which geographic data are treated as constituting a single, monolithic database and the reliance upon a linear and progressive view of cartographic history - a new interpretation of cartography's nature and of its history are presented. Cartography should be seen as a complex amalgam of cartographic modes rather than as a monolithic enterprise. Each mode comprises a set of cultural, social, and technological relations which determine cartographic practices. This conception is applied to modern European cartography in the period between 1500 and 1850, when mapmaking appeared to progress from being an art to being a science (the 'cartographic reformation'). Approaching this period without prior assumptions of progress reveals that cartography's reformation is a myth created by our misunderstanding of the unified mode of Enlightenment cartography, 'mathematical cosmography.' Considering the history of cartography to be the history of the internal changes and external interactions of several modes would appear to be consistent with the complexity of both the historical record and the character of mapmaking as an intellectual, technological, social, and cultural process.