Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation

Abstract

Looking at any wall map or atlas, we see a world composed of states. The earth's surface is divided into distinct state territories. Each is demarcated by a linear boundary, an edge dividing one sovereignty from the next. The division is accentuated when each territory is blocked out in a separate color from neighboring states, implying that its interior is a homogeneous space, traversed evenly by state sovereignty. Our world is a jigsaw of territorial states, and we take this picture for granted. Thus our historical atlases show medieval Christendom also divided into demarcated and homogeneous territories, though perhaps less neatly (see, for example, McEvedy 1992). Only the configuration is different. Familiar to us, such a depiction would have been utterly unknown to people at the time, who rarely used maps to represent geographical information and did not imagine states (or rather realms) as enclosed spaces. The transformation of their world into ours-the way the state was put on the map-is the subject of this essay.The basis of every sociological definition of the state is delimited territory. That foundation, I will argue, is not a universal property. In its spatial form, the modern state is qualitatively different from the medieval realm, a difference that owes something to the techniques of knowing and representing space originating in the Renaissance. The formation of the modern state depicted on the map was constituted in part through cartography-as a store of knowledge reflecting surveys that rulers sponsored to penetrate the ground over which they ruled; as a spatial form modeled on the map's linear boundary and homogeneous space; and, in the imagination, as political authority symbolized by territory and the earth's surface comprehended as a composite of states. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, rulership and ground had become fused in a peculiarly modern form-the territorial state. 374 0010-4175/99/2769 -4587 $7.50 ϩ .10

Splendid isolation: ‘Philosopher’s islands’ and the reimagination of space

“…A profoundly unstable and contestable graphic convention becomes, through the normalising trope of literary island space, the standard way of both depicting the state cartographically and enacting the state in terms of border practices (Biggs, 1999;Cameron, 2011b). The result is a world constituted as a series of interior spaces separated by lines that proliferate over time.…”

“…Whilst much of the literature on the metaphoric use of islands focuses, for perfectly sound historical reasons, on its importance to the formation of the nation state (Biggs, 1999), the trope of the island is now increasingly being used to create and normalise spaces beyond and against the territorial state. In particular, the figure of the island is being used to create 'new' spaces in a world that, cartographically at least, is represented as full.…”

Trapped in mirror-images: The rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine

“…Such a reading is certainly valid, yet it is also reductive. Viewing maps merely as a tool of power misses the dialectical process in which cartographic visual rhetoric has shaped geographical perceptions and political horizons (Biggs, 1999). It ignores the affective quality of maps and their performative role.…”

The Construction of National(ist) Subject: Applying the Ideals of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to Nationalism

“…National history was to reflect the standard for building both collective and subjective identities as inherited from "the beginning of time." The national past was and is documented by nationalists similarly to how maps and territorial shapes are used as essential representations, even embodiments of a particular nation or ethnic group (Biggs 1999).…”