#exslaves and abolitionists and their use of global scale conceptions to frame revolutionary atlantic and international solidarity

[fatehbaz]

Adam Sills’s well-written and beautifully produced Against the Map is in some ways a strange book to review [...] [from the disciplinary perspective of environmental studies]. Sills shows little interest in environmental history or ecocriticism, even in the “ecology without nature” mode [...]. His basic argument is that cartography, because of print capitalism, seeped into all sorts of facets of life on the British Isles during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It became something that playwrights, novelists, and creative nonfiction types, like Samuel Johnson, developed spaces of resistance to in their publications. Sills highlights the political nature and problematic historical genealogies of maps, an argument that has broader implications for [contemporary] environmental historians who use maps to convey [relatively more “objective” and/or “scientific” information] [...].

Sills begins by accepting the idea, derived from Ben Anderson’s comparative work, that “the history of the map and the history of the modern nation state are inextricably bound up with each other” (p. 1). He then cites two of the key analysts of this in relation to Britain: Richard Helgerson on the literary nationalism of the English Renaissance and John Brewer on the fiscal-military state of the eighteenth century, with its army of surveyors and excise tax collectors. In this historiography, the “surveyor emerges as an authorial figure,” key to the making of the modern state as distinct from traditional dynastic and ecclesiastical authority (p. 3). Combined with cheap printing, the result was what Mary Pedley has called a “democratization of the map” (p. 4). [...]

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For John Bunyan, the “neighborhood” became a site of resistance (as it is for Denis Wood in his 2010 Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas). [...]

For Aphra Behn, [...] the theater and “built environment” of the “fragmented, chameleonlike ... scenic stage” had the ability to challenge coherent representations of the Atlantic empire produced by maps like those of world atlas publisher and road mapper John Ogilby (p. 65).

From Dublin, Jonathan Swift directly satirized the cartographic and statistical impulses of the likes of William Petty, Henry Pratt, and Herman Moll, who all helped visualize London’s colonial relationship with Ireland [...].

From London, Daniel Defoe questioned efforts to define what precisely makes a market or market town through maps and travel itineraries, pointing toward the entropic aspects of the market (“its inherent instabilities and elusive nature”) that challenged and escaped efforts to stabilize such spaces through representations in print (p. 163).

Johnson’s travels to Scotland redefined surveying, resisting the model put forward by the fiscal-military state in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

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The final chapter and conclusion, “The Neighborhood Revisited,” looks at Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), a classic novel of the artificial environment of the estate garden. By the early nineteenth century, neighborhoods were more like gated communities and symptomatic of Burkean conservatism and nostalgia. But in Austen’s hands, their structures of affect also suggest the limits of the controversial map- and data-centric literary methodologies [...] and perhaps more broadly the digital humanities. “The principle of spatial difference and differentiation, the heterotopic conceit, always remains a formal possibility, not only at the margins of the empire but at its very center as well,... a possibility that the map cannot acknowledge or register in any fashion” (p. 234). For Sills, this is true of eighteenth-century mapping as well as the fashion for “graphs, maps, and trees” in the early twenty-first century.

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Sills’s basic argument, that a certain canonical strain of English literature - from Bunyan to Austen - positioned itself “against the map,” seems quite solid. He makes this point most directly by appealing to the work of Mary Poovey on the modern “fact,” with the map as “a rhetorical mode ... that serves to legitimate private and state interests by displacing and, ultimately, effacing the political, religious, and economic impact of those interests” (p. 91).

Nevertheless, returning to a[n] [exclusively] canonical, Bunyan-centered, “small is beautiful” neighborhood approach [potentially ignoring planetary environmental systems, the global context, in cartography] seems limited and problematic from the perspective of Anthropocene [...]. The global maps and mathematics used by the likes of Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton, which were directly satirized by Swift in the Laputa section of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), did something different than Petty’s mapping of Ireland. High-flying as they may have been, such maps and diagrams were key to the development of [...] environmental thinking by Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Alexander von Humboldt, and others in the nineteenth century. More recently, global mapping [...], like the internet closely tied initially to the modern American fiscal-military state, have [also later then] been essential to identifying processes of climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, dead zones, sea level rise, desertification, and a host of other processes that would otherwise be challenging to perceive. This is no mere “Vanity Fair.” Sills’s book would have benefited from engaging with Jason Pearl’s Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, published in 2014 [...]. Pearl also does close readings of Behn, Defoe, and Swift, choosing Margaret Cavendish instead of Bunyan and stopping in 1730, just before things became picturesque but just after they were financialized by the South Sea Bubble, Newton’s mint, and Robert Walpole. Pearl reproduces maps by Defoe of Robinson Crusoe’s global travels and of Crusoe’s island, Swift of Houyhnhnmland, Ambrosius Holbein of Thomas More’s Utopia [...].

What if rather than “against the map,” we are seeing struggles between radical and conservative cartography [...] engaged in a fight over the future (utopia)?

What if what [...] [some have] called “capitalist realism” [...], what might in the eighteenth century be called “nationalist realism,” is not the only thing happening with maps and the imagination?

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Text above by: Robert Batchelor. “Review of Sills, Adam, Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. May 2023. Published online at: h-net,org/reviews/showrev,php?id:58887. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. In this post, all italicized text within brackets added by me.]