Doing Spatial History

Riccardo Bavaj, Konrad Lawson, Bernhard Struck, Riccardo Bavaj, Konrad Lawson, Bernhard Struck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000518825
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

This volume provides a practical introduction to spatial history through the lens of the different primary sources that historians use. It is informed by a range of analytical perspectives and conveys a sense of the various facets of spatial history in a tangible, case-study based manner.

The chapter authors hail from a variety of fields, including early modern and modern history, architectural history, historical anthropology, economic and social history, as well as historical and human geography, highlighting the way in which spatial history provides a common forum that facilitates discussion across disciplines. The geographical scope of the volume takes readers on a journey through central, western, and east central Europe, to Russia, the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, and East Asia, as well as North and South America, and New Zealand. Divided into three parts, the book covers particular types of sources, different kinds of space, and specific concepts, tools and approaches, offering the reader a thorough understanding of how sources can be used within spatial history specifically but also the different ways of looking at history more broadly.

Very much focusing on doing spatial history, this is an accessible guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students within modern history and its related fields.

Part I Working with sources

1 Maps

Bernhard Struck and Riccardo Bavaj

DOI: 10.4324/9780429291739-3

The title of this chapter is ‘maps’. In fact, however, the chapter is about ‘mapping’ – or, to be more precise, ‘counter-mapping’. In his recent book Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, Matthew Edney encourages historians of maps to avoid phrases such as ‘maps are’. He suggests that generic and normative claims about the ‘real’ nature of maps can be discarded in favour of a much closer focus on the process by which maps are created. Historians of maps should seek to understand, and to explain, how and why people have engaged in ‘certain kinds of mapping’, which agendas they have pursued, and the material and discursive preconditions on which their map-making has been based.¹

This chapter is concerned with ‘counter-mapping’ – a term first advanced in 1995 by rural sociologist Nancy Lee Peluso. She aimed to describe the mapping strategies of local activists in contemporary Indonesia. These strategies were designed to counter government-sponsored forest mapping, which was carried out for the purpose of land use planning and natural resource exploitation. The term was also applied to the ‘counter-appropriation’ of official mapping techniques. The goal here was to ‘territorialize’ customary claims to natural resources, and to lend further legitimacy to those claims.²

More recently, the concept of ‘counter-mapping’ has been taken up by map historians such as Catherine Dunlop and Julie MacArthur. Dunlop has used the term in the context of 19th- and early 20th-century cartographic battles between France and Germany over Alsace and Lorraine. As she has shown, this involved various kinds of ‘counter-mapping’ by classroom teachers, geographical societies, and amateur map-makers. MacArthur’s adaptation of the concept focused on the formation (ethnogenesis) of the Luyia community in 20th-century Kenya. Her study reveals that mapping was not the sole preserve of colonial powers. In fact, it also served as a ‘tool for ethnic patriots’ in, for example, classrooms or courtrooms. The counter-mapping activities of these ‘patriots’ had two purposes: to enact both a ‘counterhegemonic’ broadside against the state, as well as a ‘generative’ production of new political imaginations.³

In conceptual terms, this chapter draws on these studies, but it directs the discussion on counter-mapping to early 19th-century Poland. More recent scholarship has conceptualized ‘Congress Poland’, established after the Congress of Vienna (1815), as a ‘colonial space’. This space was co-produced by the imperial powers of Prussia, Austria, and Russia, through and after the partitions of Poland-Lithuania of 1772, 1793, and 1795.⁴ The key primary source selected for this chapter is the Atlas statystyczny Polski i kraiów okolicznych (‘Statistical atlas of Poland and neighbouring countries’), published in 1827.⁵ This atlas will be placed in a historical context characterized by increased political suppression, and will be interpreted as an anti-imperial, anti-colonial move.

The chapter will first discuss the authorship of this atlas, which was published anonymously, with no indication of year or place of publication. It will then elucidate some of the cartographic and statistical background behind what was then a new type of atlas, before offering some thoughts on the atlas’s materiality. Finally, the chapter will provide a closer reading of the visual rhetoric of some of the maps, as well as their spatial effects. Crucial here is an exploration of the political rationale informing the atlas. This rationale may most plausibly be found in a visualization, however ambiguous, of a future Poland: both of a sovereign state and of a Polish nation. Both of these spatial imaginaries – state and nation – were in flux in 19th-century Poland, and the two were not necessarily seen as congruent, quite contrary to the ‘Western’ ideal-type of a modern nation-state.

Authorship, map type, and materiality

The origins of the Atlas statystyczny Polski are shrouded in mystery. Determining its authorship is anything but straightforward. One finds various names in the literature, as well as in the archives. Sometimes, the name of Stanisław Plater (1784–1851) pops up. In 1827, Plater also released the Atlas historique de la Pologne (which was published in Poznań, outside of Congress Poland on Prussian territory).⁶ The version of the Atlas statystyczny Polski used here (Figure 1.1) is held by the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek). It includes a hand-written note on the cover which reads: ‘[Julius Colberg]??’ This is a reference to Juliusz Kolberg (1776–1831) who, again in 1827, authored the Atlas Królestwa Polskiego (‘Atlas of the Kingdom of Poland’). This was produced in Warsaw at a short-lived Lithographic Institute (Instytut Litograficzny Szkolny). Archival staff at the Berlin State Library were even unsure about the date of publication: ‘[1830]??’ In fact, they misdated it by several years. Still, their hunch with respect to its authorship was closer to the mark.

Figure 1.1 Cover sheet, Mappa Polski [1827]. Source: Atlas statystyczny Polski i kraiów okolicznych, Staatsbibliothek Berlin/Kartenabteilung Q16884.

Indeed, and especially with respect to visual rhetoric, there are some striking similarities between the Atlas statystyczny Polski and the Atlas Królestwa Polskiego. Both were statistical atlases, and both were published bilingually, in Polish and French (the lingua franca of 19th-century European elites). By contrast, the Atlas historique de la Pologne was only published in French. It also looks rather different from the other two publications. The tireless endeavours of Polish map historians such as Janina Piasecka and Waldemar Spallek, as well as the metadata of various Polish archives, have helped to resolve some of the mysteries around the Atlas statystyczny Polski. We can now say with some certainty that it was printed in Warsaw by lithographer Józef Slawinski, and that the person behind this endeavour was, in fact, Stanisław’s elder brother Ludwik Plater (1775–1846).⁷

Ludwik Plater was born in Krasław (in today’s Latvia), just a few years after the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania. He was thus raised in a border region of the Russian Empire. He was descended from a family of Lithuanian nobles with a long pedigree of holding various official positions in the old Commonwealth. He took part in the Polish Uprising of 1794, which sought to re-establish an independent state, and which was crushed by the Russian and Prussian armies, leading to the Third Partition of 1795. In post-1815 Congress Poland, Plater held a position in the state department for revenue and customs. He was also founding director of the ‘school of forestry’ at the University of Warsaw, which was established two years after the University’s foundation in 1816. After participating in the failed uprising of 1830–31, he (and many of his like-minded compatriots) fled to Paris, where he was to spend the next ten years in exile. From the point of view of his involvement in the Atlas statystyczny Polski, it is significant that, prior to his exile, Ludwik Plater had been a member of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Science (Towarzystwo Warszawskie Przyjaciół Nauk). This was one of the earliest academic societies in Poland, founded in 1800 but dissolved by the Russian authorities in 1832. Plater was part of a committee within this academic society which was working towards a statistical description of Poland.⁸

The Atlas statystyczny Polski includes cartographic representations of print culture, education, economic production, religion, and language. It constitutes an early example of statistical mapping. It is emblematic of a cartographic turning point, which corresponded to a larger shift in the evolution of both statistics and geography. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a transformation in these areas from predominantly narrative, discursive accounts to a greater emphasis on numbers, charts, and graphs. Cartography became a key instrument in this burgeoning visualization of statistical representations.⁹ At the time of the Atlas statystyczny Polski’s publication, conventions of statistical mapping were in their incipient stages. The heyday of statistical cartography – with heightened thematic variation, and a visual rhetoric of dots, splotches, colour shading, and cross hatching – still lay in the future.¹⁰

In terms of the materiality of its production process, too, the Atlas statystyczny Polski is situated at a particular historical juncture. The atlas was produced lithographically. This means that the underlying base map was printed from a stone or a metal plate, as opposed to being etched onto a copper plate, which would have been more labour-intensive and costly.¹¹ Lithography was invented in the late 18th century; from the 1820s, it became more widely used. This more affordable technique was a crucial precondition for the production of an ‘underground’ atlas such as the Atlas statystyczny Polski.

With its 45 × 35.5 cm dimension, this is a small and unassuming publication. It contains only six maps, and it is bereft of any accompanying narrative text. This is in contrast to many other atlases produced in the early 19th century. For example, the above-mentioned Atlas historique de la Pologne by Stanisław Plater comprises a dense 12-page account in addition to ten maps. Plater’s volume charts the expansion and contraction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from its height in the 17th century to its disappearance.¹²

The paper quality of the Atlas statystyczny Polski is coarse and cheap. It was likely printed on hand-made or self-made paper. In fact, this was a makeshift product, hinting at the atlas’s clandestine, samizdat-like nature, and the subversive political agenda behind it. This much was also reflected in a rather dismissive review by Prussian geographer Heinrich Berghaus, who found the atlas to be of ‘no great geographical value’. Its size and material quality certainly paled in comparison with the more comprehensive, elaborate, and much pricier Administrativ-Statistischer Atlas vom Preussischen Staat (‘Administrative-statistical atlas of the Prussian state’). This was published around the same time as the Atlas statystyczny Polski. Indeed, this second publication was also reviewed by Berghaus in the very same journal issue in which he made his snide remarks about Plater’s ‘not very nice’ atlas.¹³

Incidentally, Berghaus was also unsure about the author of the Atlas statystyczny Polski, which he mistakenly believed to have been published in 1830. As he observes in his review, rumour had it that the atlas’s creation could be attributed to the same ‘Count Plater’ who authored the Atlas historique de la Pologne (i.e. Stanisław).¹⁴ And yet, despite the shadowy origins of the Atlas statystyczny Polski, authorship of an atlas is rarely so difficult to establish. Indeed, particular names can even become synonymous with particular cartographic products. Berghaus himself is a good example of this. The Physikalischer Atlas (‘Physical atlas’), produced by August Petermann’s Gotha-based Perthes publishing house, became known simply as ‘the Berghaus’.¹⁵

But even in such cases of demonstrable authorship, where a name came to stand for scientific authority, one should perhaps sound a note of caution. This is especially so with respect to more extensive, and highly collaborative, cartographic endeavours. Here, the question of authorship tends to be rather more complex. In his Cartography in France (1987), Josef Konvitz explores the making of the ‘map of Cassini’, the Carte Générale de la France (1747–1818). The origins of this map date back to the 1660s, to Louis XIV and his First Minister of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The cartographic survey this map was based on occupied four generations of the Cassini family.¹⁶ But this raises a thorny question: To whom should authorship of the ‘map of Cassini’ actually be attributed? Does it belong to the Cassinis and the team of surveyors who provided the scientific expertise? To the French state that initiated and sponsored it? Or to other relevant and involved bodies, such as the Académie des sciences? After all, this last institution had a vested interest in pursuing related scientific endeavours, such as measuring the Paris meridian (a line of longitude running through France’s foremost observatory).

The question of authorship, and of the production process, is thus clearly more complex than it might seem, even in the case of high-profile maps such as those by the Cassinis. But authorship remains particularly opaque with respect to ‘underground’ maps, such as those in the Atlas statystyczny Polski. We are left with very little ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Spatial history: An expansive field
• Part I Working with sources
• Part II Exploring spaces
• Part III Reflecting on concepts, tools, and approaches
• Selected bibliography
• Index