Weapons of imperialism: As an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum makes tellingly clear, maps embody complex cultural meanings

Apollo, April, 2008 by Huw Lewis-Jones

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, Marlow relishes the lure of the indefinite: 'At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map ... I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.' So often quoted as an example of how maps stir the geographical imagination, we can also glimpse the map's double function, as both opening and later closing a territory. Conrad's delight in the blank space--like that of many other writers--was also a symptom of a wider attraction: a view of a world of compelling emptiness ready for the taking, a wilderness vacant for seizure, arresting the attention of mapmakers, merchants, monarchs, perhaps adventurers, bureaucrats, or even modern town-planners, all driven and duty-bound to fill it, to make the illusory finite, to grasp at the unknown.

Surrounded as we are today by maps of everything from city streets and transport routes to the heavens themselves, we can only imagine the wonder and unease that attended the craft of the early cartographers. All maps are the products of imagination. The history of map use shows how often maps can embody specific forms of power and authority. The steps for making a map --gathering, selection, classification, the creation of a visual language, the position of hierarchies--are all inherently rhetorical and value laden. No map is ever the truly objective description of place. Like all things imaginative, maps are enhanced and embellished both in the making and in the many ways that they are read.

'Mapping the Imagination'--a display of some treasures from the prints and drawings collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum--could easily be missed by a visitor, tucked away as it is amongst superb silverware and fine Georgian canvases, yet the selection is well considered and deserves more than a chance discovery. Providing a taut introduction to the social dimension of the making of maps and the ongoing fictions of factual representation, the exhibition tempts repeat visits, to have another go at decoding its walls papered with symbols. One begins to understand how maps, like art, far from being a 'transparent opening to the world', are but a particular human way of looking at and recreating an image of the world. Maps are ineluctably cultural creations.

The geographer J. Brian Harley often wrote that maps, like muskets, were, among other things, 'weapons of war'. From pre-Columbian Amerindian cosmography through the richness of medieval mappae mundi, from Japanese portolans to the barrage of 19th-century British Admiralty charts, maps made and manipulated an expanding realm of understanding. Whole futures and fortunes might reside in a few scribbled lines. As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism. Insofar as they were used in the colonial enterprise, with lands grabbed on paper before they were effectively occupied, shores claimed before they were stepped upon, maps anticipated empire.

Surveyors marched alongside soldiers, cartographers charted new worlds as ships carved up the oceans, and maps for reconnaissance and general information turned into tools for pacification, civilisation and practical exploitation; maps were used to legitimise the throes of conquest and empire, real and imagined. Distinctions of class and power are engineered, embedded, and reified by means of cartographic signs--the size of symbols, thickness of lines, height of lettering, shade, colour and contour. Cartographers manufacture power. To catalogue and measure space is to appropriate it. In the dividing boundary, in gross generalisation or the telling omission, maps create, wrote Harley, a 'spatial panopticon' of control and illusion.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Maps take many forms here. There are patterned 18th-century fan mounts, Kentish legal documents, Jamaican town plans, John Ogilby's pioneering atlas, sensual circles of text describing the sleet and heather of a Highland journey, a sketch for Winnie-the-Pooh, a juvenile board game set on the high seas, and mundane yet quite magical designs for municipal sunken gardens. A map of the human condition by Richard Dadd, who was incarcerated as insane after murdering his father, presents territory crevassed with temptation and danger. In this beguiling cartography 'rivers of desperation' flow into a 'great bay of panic' and the giant 'sea of trouble'.

Artists continue to adapt map iconography to express their ideas and experiences of place. In the print diptych Air Routes of the Worm (2007) Langlands and Bell convey the relative importance of dispersed locations, now perpetually connected. Here also are Simon Patterson's iconic The Great Bear (1992), with its Tube map constellation of 'stars in the galaxy of fame' and London's Kerning, commissioned by the International Society of Typographers in 2006, which uses words to map out the metropolis as a web of journeys. Susan Stockwell's map Pattern of the Worm (2000), stained in tea over a paper dressmaking pattern, reassembles imperial luxuries in a vision of unexpected violence. Fabric tears and pins point to the costs of this far-flung impulse. Her Tea Country (2000) shows the United Kingdom shaped by contemporary commodities and its colonial past.