Building an Image of Empire: Understanding Space and Mapmaking in the 17th- and 18th-Century Great Lakes Region

The Great Lakes served commercial, military, diplomatic, and social purposes for different Indigenous communities, including the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Wendat (Huron), and later, for French, English, and American settlers. The lake system also represented a crucial gateway to the continental interior, vast natural resources, and the overlapping riverine world that connected the entire continent. Projecting territorial control or possession onto this region proved crucial in imperial contests over North America, regardless of how imagined or fictive that control may have been. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French Empire imposed its imperial ambitions onto a North American world dominated by dynamic, powerful, and autonomous Indigenous Nations. Distant cartographers, in their workshops in Paris, relied on diverse sources sent across the Atlantic by missionaries, explorers, and administrators, against the backdrop of imperial ambitions and expectations, to construct an image of vast North American spaces and the place of their respective empires within this continental world. This presentation will share a portion of my larger project, which seeks to explore three dimensions of French map-making; the process of information collection, the production of the map itself, and the use of maps of the Great Lakes by different individuals for different purposes over time. Using a series of specific maps, alongside contextual details of the period, this presentation will layer different perspectives and scales of analysis, and compare curated imperial geospatial interpretations with individual on-the-ground realities, to explore how French historical maps came together, the diverse processes of information selection, and what factors influenced their production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.