Decolonizing the Map

Cartography from Colony to Nation

James R. Akerman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780226422787
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226422817
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues: how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself.
 
These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continents—Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the long—and clearly unfinished—parallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

CARTOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIZATION

Raymond B. Craib

I. INTRODUCTION

I will begin with a rather plain but instructive map: map 6 from James Francis Horrabin’s An Atlas of Empire, published in 1937 (fig 1.1). The map, created and published on the eve of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, is a blunt representation of European colonial possessions in Africa. The image reveals visually the following statistic: six European states covering a total area of 660,000 square miles “own[ed] close on 11 and ½ million square miles in Africa.”1 Such statistics led Horrabin, a working-class educator and innovative socialist geographer, to proffer a remarkably succinct definition of Europe: it was, he wrote, “a group of States holding colonial possessions in other continents.”2 Two decades later, Frantz Fanon would take this observation to its logical, and historicized, conclusion: “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.”3

FIGURE 1.1. Africa possessed. European domination of Africa. Map 6 from J. F. Horrabin, An Atlas of Empire (London: Knopf, 1937).

At their imperial apex, colonial powers (including not only European states but also the United States and Japan) laid claim to more than three-quarters of the world’s landmass. Yet no more than a half-century later this equation had been inverted as anticolonial struggles, domestic agitation in the metropoles, an international war against fascism (colonialism’s boomerang effect, in Aimé Césaire’s powerful rendering), and international pressures of various kinds fostered the demise of most forms of colonial rule in most of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the circum-Caribbean.4 One would expect such dramatic political transformations to have serious repercussions in the realm of cartography. Certainly the “military red” of British domination no longer spread itself across the globe. If in 1898 Rand McNally could celebrate the British Empire in an atlas by noting that “the real magnitude of the vast empire of Great Britain can not be fully comprehended until it is studied in a series of GOOD MAPS, such as those contained in this volume,” by the early 1960s even the most ardent imperialists had to recognize that the empire’s sun was indeed setting.5 By 1962 Britain’s colonial empire, which had formerly spanned the globe, appeared as little more than a hodgepodge of bloody outposts on the maps of the annual British Colonial Office Lists (fig. 1.2).6

FIGURE 1.2. Bloody outposts. Directorate of Overseas Surveys, Map of the World. Insert in The Colonial Office List, 1962 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1962).

The magnitude of how much had changed in the wake of two world wars and shifts in global resource accumulation can be conveyed with a few statistics: the continent of Africa contained only four independent countries in 1948; by 1965 there were thirty-seven.7 The United Nations counted fifty-one member states in 1945; three decades later it had three times that number.8 The pace of change was so rapid that the cartographic division for the US National Geographic Society, on its September 1960 atlas plate of Africa, felt compelled to note the following: “Boundaries on this map reflect the political situation as of July 15, 1960, the day the map went to press.”9 Much had changed. But there were continuities, a reality nowhere better captured than in the fact that theories of neocolonialism developed in tandem with decolonization in the 1960s.

In this chapter I take a synoptic view of cartography and decolonization in the twentieth century and make occasional reference to nineteenth-century processes of decolonization in the Americas. The essay is intentionally broad and synthetic: it looks at colonization and decolonization across the globe and across nearly two centuries, although the primary focus is on the twentieth century. While cognizant of the fact that the particularities of decolonization varied according to time and space—something that is clear in the subsequent essays in this volume—I have taken this wide-angle perspective in order to put the historical experiences and processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia, in North America and Latin America, in Oceania and Southwest Asia into conversation, comparison, and relation to one another. Doing so highlights certain patterns and continuities but, of course, at the risk of eliding differences and disjunctures. The essay builds on a growing body of secondary literature on cartography, colonialism, and postcolonialism in order to highlight general themes and points of comparison and contrast, while at the same time plumbing particular primary sources (maps of various kinds) that illustrate such processes or trends. While it highlights certain themes and points, it invariably also suffers from elisions, exceptions, and generalizations. In this respect the essay resembles not only a map—which is inherently selective—but also “decolonization” itself which was, as historian Prasenjit Duara observes, “neither a coherent event [ . . . ] nor a well-defined phenomenon.”10

The conceptual, as well as geographic, approach to colonialism and decolonization I take here is also somewhat capacious. While my emphasis is on colonialism in the formal sense—that is, formal political control—I do, at certain points and particularly toward the end of the essay, also take up the question of decolonization and neocolonialism or informal empire. My intent is not to conflate what are, and should remain, useful distinctions—between, say, “imperialism” and “colonialism”—regarding forms of external control and/or domination. At the same time, and as will become apparent throughout the essay, such distinctions are rarely clear cut, and some attention to the range of relationships, often unequal and involving a variety of coercive mechanisms, that might be plotted on a “colonial” spectrum is warranted.11 “Informal” does not seem adjectively adequate to capture the ruthlessness with which, say, the United States engaged the Caribbean and Central America in the twentieth century.12 But more to the point, informal empire was never far removed from its more heavy-handed partner, which is why when anticolonial leaders, intellectuals, and masses living under the yoke of colonial rule spoke of independence or emancipation, they often did so with a vocabulary informed as much by socialism (and, as I will argue below, anarchism) as by nationalism or anticolonialism per se.13

I wrote this essay as part of a series of talks on mapping the transition from colony to nation, but many colonies did not make such transitions. In a recent grand work on empire, historians Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper observed that nation-states were not the only alternative to empire: federation, confederation, and a host of other possibilities existed.14 Similarly, historian Jeremy Adelman notes for the specific case of Ibero-America, “no single vision of postcolonial sovereignty filled the vacuum left behind. . . . The nation was not prefigured by colonialism to herald its demise.”15 Moreover, what exactly independence means is a contentious question. What is the relationship between decolonization and independence? Independence from what? And for whom? And how do such issues manifest themselves in the realm of cartography? To what degree does looking at decolonization through the lens of the history of cartography affect or force us to rethink our understandings of processes of decolonization and vice versa?

II. LINES, MINDS, AND NAMES

The contours of colonialism still configure the globe.16 Decolonization led to the dramatic, and still contentious, partition or territorial reconfiguration of some formerly colonized lands, most notably in what had been British India and in Southwest Asia. In other cases, colonial territorial configurations outlived their creators. While newly independent states would frequently reconfigure internal jurisdictional boundaries, the international political boundaries inscribed by colonial powers oftentimes remained intact, despite having been imposed arbitrarily, as a matter of administrative convenience, or based upon flawed and ethnocentric principles. Thus, even if they bore little relation to political, social, linguistic, or ecological relationships on the ground, such spatial constructs—and the abbreviated history they carried with them—persisted, both as a consequence of and an impetus for modern cartography.17 As geographer Matthew Sparke has aptly noted, “Cartography is part of a reciprocal or, better, a recursive social process in which maps shape a world that in turn shapes its maps.”18 Thus it was that the membership of the Organization of African Unity, created in 1966, agreed to abide by the boundaries established by the colonial powers in the years following the Berlin Conference of 1885.19 Precedent existed in such matters: while the boundaries of many of the fledgling republics of Latin America born of independence movements in the early nineteenth century would change over the course of that century, leaders of those movements initially applied the legal principle of uti possidetis juris (Latin for “as you possess under law”) to ensure that existing colonial contours would serve as the international boundaries for their new states.20 Yet those contours—and the criteria used to determine them—were themselves not easily determined or agreed upon, and boundary changes and conflicts were commonplace through much of the nineteenth century.21 Moreover, in many instances the newborn states shared with their Spanish predecessor an inability to assert administrative control beyond the bounds of the centers of political life. To use the possessive when discussing Mexico’s far north or Chile’s or Argentina’s Patagonia is to engage in a useful, but fictional, cartographic shorthand. These were regions where the postcolonial state had little purchase until the arrival of global capital and the development of new transportation and military technologies later in the century.

The fact that formerly colonized subjects did not escape the boundaries created by colonial powers does not, of course, mean that newly formed states were somehow inauthentic or colonies in postcolonial drag. Boundaries may be static (and even that is open to debate at some level) but their meanings are not. Regardless of how dramatically they obscured or overwrote other existing territorialities, boundaries created by colonial powers acquired a reality and a meaning over time to many living within their bounds. The intervening decades or centuries between the creation of a colonial territory and its demise were never mere interregnums, nor did the violence of colonialism and the imposition of new property regimes and et...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• Contributors
• Index