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Broad Intellectual Interests

Key Publications
1. Books and Monographs
2. Essays
3. Web Exhibits

Matthew H. Edney

Research and Scholarship

Broad Intellectual Interests

I am broadly interested in modern cartographies and their histories. I have several interconnecting lines of inquiry, each of which necessarily spins off into interdisciplinary territories. They are, in chronological sequence of their evolution,

(1) once I realized that there was such a thing as the history of cartography, and that I could study it, I merged my undergraduate interests in land surveying and historical geography into a concern for the practices, technologies, and institutional contexts of the surveying and mapping of property and landscapes;

(2) my pursuit of the institutional contexts of surveying led me to explore the intersections of systematic, geodetic-based surveys with both imperialism (especially with respect to British India) and state formation in the nineteenth-century;

(3) considering the development of the ideals of the modern systematic survey led me to explore the earlier ideals and practices of mapping in eighteenth-century Europe, originally in in terms of "Enlightenment science" but more recently of bourgeois public discourse;

(4) underpinning all of these points is a broad theoretical interest in the nature of maps, cartography, and their history, and so the pursuit of a critical map history;

(5) since 1995 (i.e., my move to Maine and the completion of the book on British India before 1843), I have been researching the cartographies associated with Maine, New England, and North America, especially in the colonial era; and

[I should note that before 1995 I also sustained an interest, if only for teaching and some applied research, in cartography in digital environments; the move to Maine meant that I could cease worrying about such things and become, as I like to put it, a GIS refugee.]

(6) general scholarship in the history of cartography through the medium of the award-winning History of Cartography.

Key Publications

(1) Books and Monographs

The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories. Cartographica Monograph 54. Cartographica 40, nos. 1 & 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. ISSN 0317-7173. (x + 143 pp.)

Mapping an Empire: The Geographic Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN 0-226-18487-0 cloth; 0-226-18488-9 paper. (xxii + 458 pp.). Reprinted, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 (ISBN 019-565172-3). Reprinted digitally by the University of Chicago Press, via netLibrary «www.netlibrary.com», 2000 (ISBN 0-226-18486-2).

(2) Essays

“The Irony of Imperial Mapping.” In The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, ed. James R. Akerman, 11-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

“John Mitchell’s Map of North America (1755): A Study of the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Imago Mundi 60.1 (2008): 63-85.

“Mapping Empires, Mapping Bodies: Reflections on the Use and Abuse of Cartography.” Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia, no. 63 (2007): 83-104.

“A Publishing History of John Mitchell’s Map of North America, 1755–1775.” Cartographic Perspectives, no. 58 (Fall 2007): 4-27 and 71-75.

“Mapping Parts of the World.” In Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr., 117-57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Field Museum of Natural History and the Newberry Library, 2007.

“Recent Trends in the History of Cartography: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography to the English-Language Literature.” Version 2.1. Coordinates: Online Journal of the Map and Geography Round Table, American Library Association, ser. B, no. 6 (11 April 2007).

“Printed but not Published: Limited-Circulation Maps of Territorial Disputes in Eighteenth-Century New England.” In Mappae Antiquae: Liber Amicorum Günter Schilder. Essays on the occasion of his 65th birthday, ed. Paula van Gestel-van het Schip and Peter van der Krogt, 147–58. ’t Goy-Houten, Neth.: HES & De Graaf Publishers, 2007.

“Putting ‘Cartography’ into the History of Cartography: Arthur H. Robinson, David Woodward, and the Creation of a Discipline.” Cartographic Perspectives no. 51 (Spring 2005): 14–29. This has been reprinted, with revisions and excisions, in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Praxis (e)Press, 2008), 711–28.

[MHE and Susan Cimburek] “Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard’s Narrative of King Philip’s War and his ‘Map of New-England.’” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series 61.2 (2004): 317–48.

“Bringing India to Hand: Mapping an Empire, Denying Space.” In The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum, 65–78 and 334–36. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; repr. 2005.

“New England Mapped: The Creation of a Colonial Territory.” In La Cartografia europea tra primo Rinascimento e fine dell’Illuminismo: Atti del Convegno Internazionale «The Making of European Cartography» (Firenze, BNCF-EUI, 13–15 dicembre 2001), ed. Diogo Ramada Curto, Angelo Cattaneo, and André Ferrand Almeida, 155–76. Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere «La Colombaria», «Studi» 213. Florence: Leo S. Olshki Editore, 2003.

“Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map-Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive.” In Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, 165–98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

“Theory and the History of Cartography.” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 185–91.

“Mathematical Cosmography and the Social Ideology of British Cartography, 1780–1820.” Imago Mundi 46 (1994): 101–16.

“Cartographic Culture and Nationalism in the Early United States: Benjamin Vaughan and the Choice for a Prime Meridian, 1811.” Journal of Historical Geography 20.4 (1994): 384–95.

“British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-Mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment.” The Cartographic Journal 31.1 (1994): 14–20.

“Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30.2-3 (1993): 54–68.

“The Atlas of India, 1823–1947: The Natural History of a Topographic Map Series.” Cartographica 28, no. 4 (1991): 59–91.

“Strategies for Maintaining the Democratic Nature of a Geographic Information System.” Papers and Proceedings of Applied Geography Conferences 14 (1991): 100–8.

“Politics, Science, and Government Mapping Policy in the United States, 1800–1925.” The American Cartographer 13 (1986): 295–306.

(3) Web Exhibitions

“Mapping the Republic: Conflicting Concepts of the Character and Territory of the USA, 1790–1900.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line, 10 October 2003.

“Strategic Planning in the American Revolution: Hugh, Earl Percy and the Cartographic Image of New England in the Eighteenth Century.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line, 19 April 1998.

“John Mitchell's Map: An Irony of Empire.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line 21 April 1997. Note: much of the content of this website has been superceded by my 2007 and 2008 essays on Mitchell's map.

“The Basel 1494 Columbus Letter.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line, 14 October 1996.