Matthew H. Edney
Research and Scholarship
I am broadly interested in modern cartographies and their histories. I have had several interconnecting lines of inquiry, each of which necessarily spins off across interdisciplinary territories.
1. Computer Mapping
I chose my undergraduate program in large part because it offered several substantial courses in land surveying. These led me into computer mapping. I sustained this interest through graduate school and it became the core of my initial teaching position. My move to Maine meant that I could cease worrying about such things and become, as I like to put it, a GIS refugee.
“Strategies for Maintaining the Democratic Nature of a Geographic Information System.” Papers and Proceedings of Applied Geography Conferences 14 (1991): 100–8.
2. The History of Surveying and Mappng
A certain high-school teacher killed history for me, so I did not do the subject for A-level. But college introduced me to the wonders of historical geography, which in turn introduced me in my last year to an essay by Brian Harley. In reading that essay, I suddenly realized that there was such a thing as the history of cartography and that I could in fact study it. I ended up abandoning my plans to do an M.Sc. course in land surveying and set off to the U.S.A. to pursue graduate studies in map history. I was generally interested as a graduate student -- and I remain broadly interested today -- in the practices, technologies, and institutional contexts of the surveying and mapping of property and landscapes. This interest permeates all my scholarship.
3. State and Imperial Mapping
The specific interest in the institutional contexts of surveying and mapping led me to explore the intersections of systematic, geodetic-based surveys with both imperialism (especially with respect to British India) and state formation in the nineteenth-century.
“Politics, Science, and Government Mapping Policy in the United States, 1800–1925.” The American Cartographer 13 (1986): 295–306.
“The Atlas of India, 1823–1947: The Natural History of a Topographic Map Series.” Cartographica 28.4 (1991): 59–91.
“The Patronage of Science and the Creation of Imperial Space: The British Mapping of India, 1799–1843.” In “Introducing Cultural and Social Cartography,” ed. Robert A. Rundstrom, 61–67. Cartographica 30, no. 1 (1993): Monograph 44.
“British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-Mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment.” The Cartographic Journal 31.1 (1994): 14–20.
Mapping an Empire: The Geographic Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN 0-226-18487-0 cloth; 0-226-18488-9 paper. (xxii + 458 pp.). *** Reprinted, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 (ISBN 019-565172-3). *** Reprinted digitally by the University of Chicago Press, via netLibrary «www.netlibrary.com», 2000 (ISBN 0-226-18486-2).
“Bringing India to Hand: Mapping an Empire, Denying Space.” In The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum, 65–78 and 334–36. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. (Reprinted 2005.)
“Mapping the Republic: Conflicting Concepts of the Character and Territory of the USA, 1790–1900.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line, 10 October 2003.
“Mapping Empires, Mapping Bodies: Reflections on the Use and Abuse of Cartography.” Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia, no. 63 (2007): 83-104.
“The Irony of Imperial Mapping.” In The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, ed. James R. Akerman, 11-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
4. Enlightenment Cartography
Considering the development of the ideals of the modern systematic survey led me to explore the earlier ideals and practices of mapping in eighteenth-century Europe. Originally I sought to explore this in terms of "Enlightenment science" generally and in North America more particularly. Since 2000, I have been interested in exploring "Enlightenment" ideals in the context of (bourgeois) public discourse [see sections 5 and 7, below].
“Cartographic Culture and Nationalism in the Early United States: Benjamin Vaughan and the Choice for a Prime Meridian, 1811.” Journal of Historical Geography 20.4 (1994): 384–95.
“Mathematical Cosmography and the Social Ideology of British Cartography, 1780–1820.” Imago Mundi 46 (1994): 101–16.
“Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map-Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive.” In Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, 165–98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
5. Colonial New England and North America
Since 1995, which was when I ended work on Mapping an Empire, I took the opportunity offered by my position at the University of Southern Maine to research the cartographies associated with Maine, New England, and North America, especially in the colonial era. Increasingly, my work on colonial cartographies became driven by a concern for the circulation of spatial knowledge in the transatlantic arena and more particularly in the functioning of public discourses [see section 7, below].
“The Basel 1494 Columbus Letter.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line, 14 October 1996.
“John Mitchell's Map: An Irony of Empire.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line 21 April 1997. *** much of the content of this website has been superceded by my 2007 and 2008 essays on Mitchell's map.
“Strategic Planning in the American Revolution: Hugh, Earl Percy and the Cartographic Image of New England in the Eighteenth Century.” Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. On-line, 19 April 1998.
“New England Mapped: The Creation of a Colonial Territory.” In La Cartografia europea tra primo Rinascimento e fine dell’Illuminismo: Atti del Convegno Internazionale «The Making of European Cartography» (Firenze, BNCF-EUI, 13–15 dicembre 2001), ed. Diogo Ramada Curto, Angelo Cattaneo, and André Ferrand Almeida, 155–76. Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere «La Colombaria», «Studi» 213. Florence: Leo S. Olshki Editore, 2003.
[MHE and Susan Cimburek] “Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard’s Narrative of King Philip’s War and his ‘Map of New-England.’” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series 61.2 (2004): 317–48.
“Printed but not Published: Limited-Circulation Maps of Territorial Disputes in Eighteenth-Century New England.” In Mappae Antiquae: Liber Amicorum Günter Schilder. Essays on the occasion of his 65th birthday, ed. Paula van Gestel-van het Schip and Peter van der Krogt, 147–58. ’t Goy-Houten, Neth.: HES & De Graaf Publishers, 2007.
“A Publishing History of John Mitchell’s Map of North America, 1755–1775.” Cartographic Perspectives, no. 58 (2007): 4-27 and 71-75.
“John Mitchell’s Map of North America (1755): A Study of the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Imago Mundi 60.1 (2008): 63-85.
“The Anglophone Place Names Associated with John Smith’s Description and Map of New England.” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 57, no.4 (2009): 189-207.
“Simon de Passe’s Cartographic Portrait of Captain John Smith and a New England (1616/7).” Word & Image 26 (2010): forthcoming.
“Competition over Land, Competition over Empire: Public Discourse and Printed Maps of the Kennebec River, 1753–1755.” In Early American Cartographies, ed. Martin Brückner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, forthcoming.
6. Theory and Historiography
Underpinning all of these historical themes was my broad theoretical interest in the nature of maps, cartography, and their history, and so the pursuit of a critical map history. A necessary component of this work, further stimulated by writing obituaries for Brian Harley (CaGIS 19.3 [1992]: 175-78) and David Woodward (Imago Mundi 57.1 [2005]: 75-83), has been historiographic evaluation.
“Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30.2-3 (1993): 54–68.
“Theory and the History of Cartography.” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 185–91.
“Cartography, Disciplinary History.” In Sciences of the Earth: An Encyclopedia of Events, People, and Phenomena, ed. Gregory A. Good, 1:81–85. 2 vols. Garland Encyclopedias in the History of Science, 3. New York: Garland, 1998.
“Putting ‘Cartography’ into the History of Cartography: Arthur H. Robinson, David Woodward, and the Creation of a Discipline.” Cartographic Perspectives no. 51 (2005): 14–29. *** Reprinted, with revisions and excisions, in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Praxis (e)Press, 2008), 711–28.
The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories. Cartographica Monograph 54. Cartographica 40, nos. 1 & 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. ISSN 0317-7173. (x + 143 pp.)
“Recent Trends in the History of Cartography: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography to the English-Language Literature.” Version 2.1. Coordinates: Online Journal of the Map and Geography Round Table, American Library Association, ser. B, no. 6 (11 April 2007).
“Uncharted Territory.” Times Higher Education, no. 1819 (9 November 2007): 16–19.
“Cartography, History of”; “Geo-Body”; and “Map-Reading.” In The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th ed., ed. Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael Watts, and Sarah Whatmore. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009.
7. Mapping Processes and the Big Picture of Map History
I have since 2000 sought to implement my theoretical concerns by identifying and distinguishing between specific spatial discourses and the cartographic practices they support. This processual approach originated in my reflections on the distinct modes of cartography but came to fruition with two developments. First, my work for the award-winning The History of Cartography required me to structure the design of Volume Four, Cartography in the European Enlightenment, around the modes and enterprises of cartography; the approach has since been followed for the later volumes as well. Second, as I related maps to book history, I became enamored of the sociology of texts; this specific approach, akin to actor network theory, seems especially to hold out the ability to come to terms with the formation of public discourse and the differences between manuscript and print production. In addition to underpinning my reexaminations of "classic" maps of colonial North America [see section 5, above], the processual approach permits me to write complex and sophisticated overviews of large swathes of map history.
“Mapping Parts of the World.” In Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr., 117-57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Field Museum of Natural History and the Newberry Library, 2007.
“Knowledge and Cartography in the Early Atlantic.” In Oxford Handbook on the Atlantic World, c.1450-1820, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan, forthcoming. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.