Ian J. Barrow. Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c.1765-1905. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. xii + 212 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-566546-8.

Reviewed by Douglas M. Peers (University of Calgary)
Published on H-Albion (December, 2005)

Mapping the Imperial Past

Making History, Drawing Territory asks us to reflect upon how maps helped enable imperialism, not simply in the utilitarian sense of an inventory of geographical information necessary for colonial officials, but rather as texts intended to historicize colonial authority and territorial possession. In the author's words, "land may be considered territory when it is accessed, inhabited, and possessed by a state and when that possession is circumscribed and made explicit" (p. 14). European definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space, not over people per se, but in order to control space, it was first necessary to map it and then inscribe symbols into the resulting maps to denote sovereignty. "The insinuation of the symbols of British power into an Indian landscape suggests the naturalness of that power" (p. 3). Barrow offers fascinating examples of the many embedded symbols, icons and illustrations found in British maps of India, and persuasively demonstrates the absence of Indian symbols.

Barrow's book is structured around chapters dedicated to each of what he has identified as the five successive approaches to the past employed by cartographers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first was associative history by which cartographers used British icons and illustrations as metaphors of landed estates, thereby making India legible in terms and symbols comprehensible in Britain. The second approach was to accentuate the progressive and "modern" aspects of British rule by employing the expensive yet more accurate trigonometrical surveys in place of the customary route surveys. A reverential approach then came into play as heroic figures were worked into maps as a way of drawing history and geography together; the example used here is the decision to name the highest mountain in the world after the surveyor-general of India, George Everest. The fourth stage emerged in the late nineteenth century: in what Barrow terms romantic history, maps from this period, particularly of the lands beyond India's northern and northwestern frontier, came to rely upon scientifically suspect yet romantically charged route surveys produced by Indian pandits who ventured into unknown lands on behalf of the British. The final stage was nostalgic history in which maps were tied to particular epochal moments in the history of British colonial rule. Here, what constitutes a map is redefined to include the commemorative memorial Lord Curzon established as a site of remembrance for the British who had died in Calcutta's Black Hole some 150 years before. In deploying these examples, Barrow is very alive to the question of whether we can read these "maps" not only in the way in which their makers intended, but also as their audience would have seen them. This is a most difficult task and the text is peppered with "mays," "mights" and "coulds," which testify to the challenge posed by trying to determine whether the messages which the author has found in the maps were ones which would have resonated with a nineteenth-century observer. Yet even with these caveats, one might question whether the memorial to the Black Hole undertaken by Curzon is a useful metric of imperial attitudes in general; after all, both the site and the event had become eclipsed in the public eye. It is unlikely that the memorial would have been erected had it not been for Curzon, thereby suggesting that in this case we are dealing more with the actions of a powerful, yet in many ways quite unique, individual rather than a general imperial zeitgeist.

In making and developing his argument about the importance of maps in articulating an imperial vision, the author locates his work within the burgeoning number of studies that address the origins, character and functioning of colonial knowledge systems. Similar arguments about the British will to know, to document and to classify, and how such strategies enabled colonial rule while simultaneously being enabled by it, have been made about other knowledge-projects such as, for example, censuses, medical topographies, gazetteers, and caste handbooks. The significance of such strategies to the success of imperial conquest and consolidation is widely acknowledged owing to the efforts of scholars such as Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, Ronald Inden, and C. A. Bayly, to name but a few, and to Matthew Edney's work on the cartographic history of the East India Company.[1] Edney's pioneering study used the mapping of India to examine the interface between science, ideology and colonial institutions, and showed how these interactions not only helped facilitate colonial rule, but also reflected the Enlightenment will to know and to codify. Barrow extends this work in interesting and novel directions, particularly with respect to the ways in which maps helped to buttress genealogies linking the past to the present, which underscored British claims of colonial legitimacy.

More contentious, however, is Barrow's assumption that colonial maps signal a distinctly modern approach that drew upon the blending of western historical and cartographical discourses, and hence he leans towards the postcolonial position that colonialism produced a profound epistemological rupture between a premodern and precolonial past and a modern and colonial present. There is a danger in treating colonial knowledge systems as fundamentally and even irrevocably different from their precolonial predecessors. As argued in recent works by Norbert Peabody and C. A. Bayly (among others), British officials not only drew upon Indian expertise, which in turn created opportunities for ideas to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, but it is becoming increasingly clear that many precolonial Indian states had well-developed knowledge economies of their own.[2] It would be useful to know more about indigenous concepts of space-time relationships, and how these were captured and codified, particularly as Barrow has demonstrated, through his case study of the Black Hole Memorial, the need to push our understanding of cartography beyond maps. There were also important obstacles to whatever cartographic hegemony the British aimed at, not the least of which was the often ambivalent, if not downright contradictory, signals sent from the East India Company. This is not to suggest that maps were not the powerful instruments that Barrow has argued. Yet when the British embarked on their invasion of Burma in 1824, one of the most challenging campaigns to date, their biggest difficulty was figuring out where they were going, for not only did they lack even rudimentary maps of the territories beyond their eastern frontiers, but the Company was hesitant to invest in the production of such maps and were often loath to provide maps to even their own officials. The few maps that were made were closeted away in London (though ironically an officer would later come across one in Paris, having been denied a copy while in London). Many studies of colonial knowledge forget just how stingy the Company was, and that while the will to know was ever-present, the will to economize often proved to be even more powerful. There are also a number of interesting questions about several anomalies of imperial rule in India: before 1857, strictly speaking, the British were represented by a commercial corporation that was by virtue of the grant of diwani in 1765 itself the subject of the Mughal Emperor. And pre- and post-1857 British India consisted of territories under direct British rule along with areas that were nominally independent--the so-called princely states. How did colonial maps capture, if they did at all, such ambivalences, and if they did not, what can we infer from the silence? And if maps are so revealing about the intentions and culture of colonial rule, it would be useful to extend the analysis to other parts of the empire. Were similar strategies at work in the Ordnance Surveys of Ireland? And what can we say of Africa? Barrow opens up a fascinating point of departure by comparing map-making in India with what the British financed in Ceylon. In the former, a detailed, expensive yet comprehensive trigonometrical survey was undertaken, but this was not the case in Ceylon where the seductions of a "big science" approach were apparently lost on local officials. This suggests that the situation in India was quite unique, which reminds us yet again of the difficulty of extrapolating from India to the empire and vice versa. In other words, why were maps referential in most colonies, yet, as Barrow has so eloquently shown, reverential in India?

Notes

[1]. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

[2]. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Citation: Douglas M. Peers. Review of Barrow, Ian J., Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c.1765-1905. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. December, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10977

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