James R. Akerman - Decolonizing the Map

James R. Akerman

The idea for the Seventeenth Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography (2010), Mapping the Transition from Colony to Nation, the basis for this book, emerged from the Fifteenth Nebenzahl Lectures, The Imperial Map (2004), published under the same name by the University of Chicago Press in 2009. The Imperial Maps broad, if episodic, examination of how modern imperial powers used mapping to conquer and manage their colonies and to promote and affirm their imperial identities, as well assomewhat antitheticallyits contemplation of the limits of imperial mapping suggested an obvious counterpoint and successor. This volume publishes the result. At the simplest (and titular) level it considers the roles mapping has played in the passage from colony to nationor, if you will, from dependent to independent state. The seven chapters all concern the engagement of mapping in the long and clearly unfinished process of decolonization and the parallel process of nation building from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. A few scholars have addressed this issue. However, the subject has not been examined systematically or comprehensively. The first chapter, by Ray Craib, offers a wide-ranging introduction to the subject, identifying salient features of the relationship between mapping and decolonization, and placing them within the context of recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself. There follow seven case studies examining this relationship over more than two centuries and on three continents. Needless to say, this volume can only suggest the general contours of this vast subject and propose some of its historical problems and dilemmas.

When I first conceived of this series I imagined that the papers would focus on twentieth-century mapping and would be associated primarily with African and Asian countries emerging from European imperialism. It soon became clear that the questions I wanted to ask of the mid-twentieth-century decolonization could not, or should not, be separated from the revolutions and emergent nationalisms of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the broad theme of decolonizing the map could easily have embraced accounts of mapping and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalist movements for independence in Eastern Europe, and their echoes in post-Soviet times. In the end, the papers focus on Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I made a calculated decision as wellperhaps not theoretically defensibleto exclude America north of Mexico, already the subject in English of a large literature. There are other notable gaps and biases in chronological and geographic coveragethe former French colonies in Southeast Asia and Africa, for example, are not treated here, while former British and Spanish colonies are the subject of three articles apiece. Even so, the book covers a broad chronological and geographic context, and while there are commonalities to be found in the mapping and decolonization from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuriessuch as the iconic and propagandistic use of mapsthe several contributions show the relationship between mapping and decolonization, like the concept of decolonization itself, to be multifaceted and defiant of summary. Our goal in assembling this volume has not been to offer a comprehensive treatment, but rather to move toward an understanding of the processes at work in decolonizing the map and to suggest where there may be common issues across time and geography, while respecting the distinctiveness of each context. In much the same way that