The Politics of Scientific Representation: The International Map of the World, 1891–1939

The International Map of the World was a hugely ambitious scheme to make a uniform atlas of the earth in unprecedented detail. It was first proposed in 1891 and its rigorous standards were given the force of international treaty in 1913, with nearly every country in the world signing on to produce maps of its own territory for international distribution. Although its goals and organization gradually shifted in subsequent decades, it remained a going concern until the 1980s. This paper analyzes the early years of the project in order to understand the relationship between self-consciously “scientific” cartography, national sovereignty, and the discourse of civilization in the late colonial era. I am especially interested in the dual logic of representation that animated the project, with cartographic representation and political representation both reinforcing the other and contributing to the authority of the map. By analyzing both the visual content of the map and the process by which maps were actually made (or not), I show how this scientific project policed a very specific boundary between foreign and domestic space, colony and metropole, and civilized and backward peoples. To reach this conclusion, however, I argue that the project’s difficulties and failures are just as important as its successes and tell us just as much (if not more) about the ideals of national sovereignty and internationalism before World War II.