Spatial Histories of Empire

Abstract

There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements of the construction of global European power both in older imperial histories and in post-Foucauldian studies emphasizing social control and governmentality in colonial societies. ‘Mapping’ features in this telling as both a technology in the service of empire and as a metaphor for the colonial project of mastery through knowledge accumulation and control.