The British Imperial Imagination in the Maps of Herman Moll, 1700–30

As British elites contended with their Dutch, French, and Spanish counterparts for imperial prerogatives at the end of the 17th century, a cartographer with important political and economic connections, Herman Moll, engraved maps that prefigured British territorial claims.  Moll, a German mapmaker who immigrated to London in the late 17th century, was a strong proponent and propagandist of British overseas expansion.  He often plagiarized his information from French and other sources (a common practice at the time) but his maps were not only state-of-the-art depictions of the globe's surface and of high technical virtuosity, they also foregrounded British foreign economic and political interests in an age of fierce imperial rivalries.  Since Moll found most maps unmemorable, this presentation will explore how Moll invites readers to engage his cartographic visions by examining his visual and graphic vocabulary, a vocabulary which inscribed British cultural and social values onto imperially contested spaces in the Americas and Asia in ways that allowed map readers to see those values as residing naturally and inevitably in those spaces.