The Growth of Map History in the Nineteenth Century
/An Analysis of Three Bibliographies of the “History of Cartography”
Here’s another bit that I’m cutting from the book as no longer fitting, this time because I have revised my understanding and half of the analysis is moot. I might do more with Acta Cartographica, especially as it pertains to the different precise approaches (traditional vs internal) and, within traditional, between globalist and localist, content-emphasis and context-emphasis. But I’m now wondering that all such analysis would do would be to reveal the editorial biases of the editorial board and nothing much about the character of map historical work in the nineteenth century. That further analysis requires me to do a lot more (rather tedious) classification of the works reprinted, and that is taking time, so don’t count on it.
In support of a general account of the rise of the study of map history, I undertook a simple analysis of some works that allow approximate metrics of the number of works in the history of cartography published in the nineteenth century. I originally did this work when I still thought that the systematic and organized study of early maps began in the early modern era. Spoiler: it didn’t. There were sporadic elements of interest in early maps, from a variety of perspectives, but no organized search for early maps and their study until the 1830s. The benefit of this analysis is not as great as it might be, and frankly would take more words to explain and justify the analysis than to present and discuss the results, so I’m cutting it from the book manuscript.
But people might be interested in the data and the conclusions they do sustain, which I expand on a bit here, anticipating the book.
Data
There are three twentieth-century bibliographies of primarily nineteenth-century works on “history of cartography” or “historical cartography,” or even just “cartography.” All three are far too variable and inconsistent to permit much more than counts of works by decade, but they nonetheless agree on the broad phases of growth in the field’s productivity.
1) P. Lee Phillips (1901)
One of the first tasks undertaken by P. Lee Phillips after 1897, when he was appointed as the first head of a separate Hall of Maps and Charts in the Library of Congress, was to produce a preliminary catalog of maps of America held in that institution. He prefaced the catalog with a bibliography of cartography, which is to say a listing of essays and books that had come to his attention as dealing with the practices and history of map making (Phillips 1901). The bibliography contained a total of some 1,150 entries (12–13 entries per page, for 86 pages), and each work appeared twice (once by author, once by subject). Out of about 650 unique works, about 100 concerned contemporary rather than early maps. That is, they were cartographic manuals and accounts of surveys, etc., that were not themselves historically minded but that were sufficiently old to be of historical interest; as such, they are not of interest in tracing the rise of map history as a field of study.
Phillips’s bibliography helps date the serious rise of map history: of the remaining 550 identified works, which had an historical mindset, almost all had been published after 1860.
2) Lev Bagrow (1917–18)
Shortly thereafter, Leo Bagrow—when still working as a hydrographer in the Russian navy under his original name of Lev Semenovich Bagrov—prepared a much more extensive bibliography of no less than 1,881 items in the history of cartography (Bagrov 1917). He prefaced this bibliography with a short account of the history of cartography and also a brief historiography of the field (translated by Sims 1991, 96–98). The bibliography presents a curious bibliographical conundrum that Doug Sims was not able to fully resolve. Specifically, the bibliography was originally published as an entire issue of a journal, under date 1918 (Bagrov 1918), and then reprinted as a separate work under date 1917 (Bagrov 1917). Go figure. I have a xerox copy of the latter, which I have used for the analysis.
The first page of Bagrow’s essay and bibliography, with an ornament reused from Nordenskiöld, who had reused it from Santarém, who had reproduced it from an early ms of Pomponius Mela.
The origins of the bibliography lay in Bagrow’s trip to the library of Helsinki University to consult the collections of the famed Finnish Arctic explorer, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, prior to leading his own 1912 expedition to the Kara Sea, north of Siberia. Once there, he discovered Nordenskiöld’s substantial collections of early maps and atlases and also works on map history. Bagrow was entranced. Nordenskiöld’s library formed the basis of the bibliography, but Bagrow further noted that he had not been able to verify all the references against the holdings of the libraries in St. Petersburg and therefore acknowledged that there were undoubtedly errors (Sims 1991, 92, 96). Bagrow too listed books and essays that were not historical works when published.
A simple tally of the dates of publication of the works itemized by Bagrow is revealing. The number of itemized works increases steadily, decade by decade through the nineteenth century, with a sudden increase in the 1870s, and another in the 1890s. Fully half of the identified works came from the two decades between 1890 and 1909. See columns 6–7 in the following table:
3) Acta Cartographica (1967–81)
The third resource is not actually a bibliography but a collection of old works on map history collected within the twenty-seven volumes of Acta Cartographica, published by Nico Israel in Amsterdam between 1967 and 1981. The reprints were photographic reproductions, page by page, and did not involve any resetting of the type. Almost all the reprinted works were articles and book chapters, supplemented by a few doctoral dissertations and monographs; all had originally been published after 1800. Some essays were very short, no more than two or three pages; others ran into the hundreds of pages. Most were works of traditional map history, but there were also a few internal works by practicing map makers, and there was a smattering of contemporary works that were seen as having historical value.
While many of the reprinted works came from the leading journals, such as the Bulletin de la société de géographie or the Geographical Journal, many more had appeared in rather obscure outlets and had likely not been widely accessible to the international map historical community, even when they had originally been published. For example, the blurb on an advertising brochure specifically cited the manner in which “the records of the mapping of N.W. America, for instance, were published in the U.S. Treasury Department Reports” (Horn [1972]). This statement referred to J. G. Kohl’s essays published in the reports of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (Kohl 1856, 1857a, 1885). (Although, as it happened, none of those publications would actually be reprinted in Acta Cartographica!) In the post-war era of academic expansion, it seemed important to make all of these old and inaccessible studies available to a new generation of map historians.
Israel was self-consciously internationalist in scope: not only did each of the five members of the editorial board, identified in each volume, represent a particular national community but he made the final selection of works to be reproduced with the goal of giving equal treatment to the different languages of the community. The advertising brochure for the series stated that the five members of the initial editorial board—Wilhelm Bonacker (Germany), François de Dainville (France), Cornelis Koeman (Netherlands), Walter Ristow (USA), and R. A. Skelton (UK)—had “combed” 80 journals “to yield a crop of 1,450 articles in 7 languages” with a total of 7,500 pages. These articles were then selected for publication with an eye to ensuring parity in the representation of the languages across the volumes: 79 in German, 76 in French, 73 in English, 29 in Italian, 15 in Dutch, 8 in Spanish, and 2 in Portuguese (Horn [1972], [ii]–[iv]).
Beyond this apparent principle of linguistic and by implication national equity, there seems to have been no editorial principles concerning subject matter. Brian Harley (1968) accordingly lamented the complete lack of commentary about the editorial principles behind the selection of works to be reprinted; explanatory prefaces first appeared only with volume 19 (1974) but they remained rather vague.
Despite the difficulty of accounting for precise editorial biases, the overall chronological pattern of works included in the volumes of Acta Cartographica is the same as for the two bibliographies. Of the 453 works reproduced in all, only about 8% predated 1860, with the majority originally appearing after 1890. There is an understandable drop off in the reprinting of more recent works, presumably because they were considered to be more accessible to map historians (columns 2–5 in the above table). It is also possible to count the total number of pages of reprinted works—13,371—which again grew steadily in output until the 1860s when the page count increased rapidly, and again in the 1890s.
Conclusions…and the Twentieth Century
Putting these three bits of data together, we can identify three early periods in the study of map history.
First, before 1860, an era of little interest. Frankly, most of the works in this era comprise studies in the history of discoveries and exploration, in which maps were cited as sources of evidence, sometimes extensively, but the maps themselves were not the objects of study.
** This is the period described by Kohl in his 1856 lecture to the Smithsonian Institution, in which he argued for the promotion of geography as the newly configured discipline of human-environmental relations and for the careful curation of maps in libraries. Kohl was really pushing for the formation of a national map library at a moment when some people were pushing for the newly founded Smithsonian to become a national library. (The Library of Congress would not acquire that role until well after the Civil War.) “Until our days,” Kohl declared, geography had been “neglected,” the “history of geography” had been utterly neglected,” and “the history of geographical maps, has scarcely ever been thought of.” For centuries, maps—“these old and precious documents”—had been “allowed to perish” and were “never raised to the dignity of historical documents.” Only in “our days” had “some enlightened men…undertaken to glean and collect the few scattered relics which may yet be found” (Kohl 1857b, 94–95). He went on to refer to the example of the work of Alexander von Humboldt in “bringing to light and making accessible…that excellent picture of the world made by Juan de la Cosa” (i.e., Humboldt 1836–39) and to Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany’s (1853) study of Martin Behaim and his globe, a work that included a contribution by Humboldt on the first maps of the new world and the name “America” (Humboldt 1853). And Kohl observed that “such publications have become comparatively numerous in Germany, as well as in ltaly, in England, and in other countries. It is now quite a common thing to edit old globes and maps, and to write dissertations on them.” He noted how it had become “the fashion to adorn…the republication of an old work of travels with a sketch of an old map, which some 30 or 40 years ago would not have been considered an ornament at all.” This trend encompassed not only histories and documentary facsimiles concerning discoveries and exploration (e.g., Navarette 1825–37) but also locally focused works: “Nay, scarcely any place has of late published a catalogue of its town library without taking advantage of the occasion to add a copy of one of its old chartographical treasures” (Kohl 1857b, 97)
Second, a period of modest interest and growth in the three decades of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. This is when scholars start to come to grips with the character and particular history of maps and their makers, working from both a globalist perspective (history of empire and Western civilization) and a localist one (history of nations and provinces).
Third, a “take-off” after 1890, which seems to have been stimulated by the 1892 Columbus Quadricentennial. (My gut feeling is that had I counted by half-decades, the threshold would have been 1885, as scholars started gearing up for the event.) This was the explanation offered in an anonymous review of a lengthy cartobibliography and exhibition catalog of maps of the Pacific (Wroth 1944) that had almost certainly been written by John Kirtland Wright, former librarian and then director of the American Geographical Society. Wright began the review with an historiographical reflection:
Although many geographical ideas cannot be expressed on maps, the fundamental and distinctive geographical facts and conceptions admit of clear and unambiguous exposition on maps alone. For this reason, the study of old maps has come to be recognized as more than a mere appendix to the history of geography, dealing with an important auxiliary craft or technique. It is recognized as providing a central core of evidence concerning the evolution of geographical knowledge, comparable to the central core of evidence that old musical scores provide for the history of music.
The intensive cultivation of historical cartography from this point of view and in the critical modern sense began a little more than fifty years ago. Universal interest in the great age of discovery aroused by the four-hundredth anniversaries of the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama led in the 1890’s and 1900’s to the investigation and reproduction by such scholars as A. E. Nordenskiöld, E. L. Stevenson, Konrad Kretschmer, and E. G. Ravenstein, not only of maps and globes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but of the whole European cartographic background furnished by the maps of Ptolemy, the medieval mappaemundi, and the portulan charts. More recently, similar research has been carried into ever widening and more remote domains. Thus we have, among much else, Konrad Miller’s work on the maps of the medieval Arabs, that of Baddeley on the early cartography of Siberia and of Hermann on ancient and medieval Chinese cartography of inner Asia, the contributions of Wagner, Karpinski, Nunn, and others to the historical cartography of the American continent, and now the present notable monograph by Wroth for the Pacific Ocean. (Wright 1945, 505)
In other words, the history of geographical exploration and discovery continued to drive interest in early maps and led to their study. This was clearly the case with Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld in his two great studies of early geographical and marine mapping, that together bracketed the triumphal Columbian celebrations of 1892 (Nordenskiöld 1889, 1897). Samuel Eliot Morison (1942, xv–xvi) also suggested that the 1885 Treaty of Berlin, when the European powers had carved up Africa between themselves, had raised interest in the political import of early mapping.
It is not coincidental that these reflections were made in the midst of World War II, a period of intense increase in map literacy in the USA (Schulten 1998, 2001) and also profound technological changes in cartographic practices that prompted historical and historiographical reflection. (Such reflection would also lead to new and influential retellings of the history of cartography by Brown 1949 and Crone 1953.)
There appears to be something of a chronological parallel between the rise in historical studies of maps and of Latin America, in that both have been bracketed by the quadri- and quincentennials of the Columbian Encounter. (I am indebted to Jordana Dym for drawing this parallel, in conversation in January 2019; see also Lois 2012.) The tricentennial of Columbus in 1792 had been largely unrecognized, except for some attention in the newly independent U.S.A. (Edney 2020, 208). The quadricentennial kicked the study of early maps into high gear, although it must be acknowledged that this interest was not solely globalist and imperialistic. The quincentennial led to the wholesale rethinking of the disastrous effects the Columbian encounter on the peoples, environments, and economies of the Americas, at the same time as scholars were rethinking the political nature of maps and cartography. Traditional map history did not come to a crashing halt, but its pursuit was substantially curtailed.
References
Bagrov, Lev Semenovich. 1917. Istoriia geograficheskoi karty: Ocherk i ukazatel’ literatury / The History of the Geographical Map: Review and Bibliography. Petrograd. Originally published as Vestnik arkheologii i istorii, izdavaemyĭ Arkheologicheskim institutom [Bulletin of Archeology and History, Archaeological Institute] 23 (1918).
———. 1918. “Istoriia geograficheskoi karty: Ocherk i ukazatel’ literatury / The History of the Geographical Map: Review and Bibliography.” Vestnik arkheologii i istorii, izdavaemyĭ Arkheologicheskim institutom [Bulletin of Archeology and History, Archaeological Institute] 23: •••–••. Reprinted as a separate publication (Petrograd, 1917 [sic]).
Brown, Lloyd A. 1949. The Story of Maps. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Reprinted, New York: Dover, 1979.
Crone, G. R. 1953. Maps and Their Makers: An Introduction to the History of Cartography. London: Hutchinson.
Edney, Matthew H. 2020. “Creating ‘Discovery’: The Myth of Columbus, 1777–1828.” Terrae Incognitae 52, no. 2: 195–213.
Ghillany, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1853. Geschichte des Seefahrers Ritter Martin Behaim nach den ältesten vorhandenen Urkunden bearbeitet. Eingeleitet durch eine Abhandlung: Ueber die ältesten Karten des Neuen Continents und dem Namen Amerika von Alexander v. Humboldt. Nürnberg: Bauer und Raspe.
Harley, J. B. 1968. “Acta Cartographica, vol. 1 (1967).” Geographical Journal 134, no. 3: 452.
Horn, Werner, ed. [1972]. [Acta Cartographica] Contents of Volumes I–XV, 1967/72. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
Humboldt, Alexander von. 1836–39. Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du nouveau continent et des progrès de l’astronomie nautique aux quinzième et seizième siècles. 5 vols. Paris: Librarie de Gide. Reprinted as Kritische Untersuchung über die historischen Entwicklung der geographischen Kenntnisse von der Neuen Welt und den Fortschritte der nautischen Astronomie im 15ten und 16ten Jahrhundert, trans. Julius Ludwig Ideler, 3 vols. in 2. Berlin: Nicolai’schen Buchhandlung, 1836–39.
Humboldt, Alexander von. 1853. “Ueber die ältesten Karten des Neuen Continents und den Namen Amerika. Mit einer genauen Abbildung des Behaim’schen Globus vom Jahr 1492 in 2 Planigloben nach seiner natürlichen Größe und 3 ältesten Karten von Amerika.” In Ghillany (1853, 1–12).
Kohl, J. G. 1856. “Abstract of a Complete Historical Acccount [sic] of the Progress of Discovery on the Western Coast of the United States from the Earliest Period.” In Report of the Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey during the Year 1855, Appendix 64, 374–75. 34th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Executive Document 22 (Serial 826). Washington, D.C.: G.P.O.
———. 1857a. “Report of J. G. Kohl, Esq., on the Method, Scope, and Completion of a History of Maritime Discovery and Exploration on the Western Coast of the United States, Prepared for Publication with the Records of the United States Coast Survey.” In Report of the Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, Showing the Progress of the Survey during the Year 1857, Appendix 52, 414–33. 35th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Executive Document 33 (Serial 932). Washington, D.C.: G.P.O.
———. 1857b. “Substance of a Lecture Delivered at the Smithsonian Institution on a Collection of the Charts and Maps of America.” In Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1856, 93–146. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Reprinted as Acta Cartographica 3 (1968): 185–238.
———. 1869. History of the Discovery of Maine. Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 2nd ser. 1. Portland, Me.: Maine Historical Society. Reprinted in part in Acta Cartographica 2 (1968): 245–357, 3 (1968): 239–59, 5 (1969): 337–42.
———. 1885. “History of Discovery and Exploration on the Coasts of the United States.” In Report of the Superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, Showing the Progress of the Work during the Fiscal Year Ending with June 1884, Appendix 19, 495–617. 48th Congress, 2nd Session, House Executive Document 43 (Serial 2297). Washington, D.C.: G.P.O.
Lois, Carla. 2012. “¿Desde la periferia? Enfoques y problemas de la agenda actual sobre la historia de la cartografía en América latina.” espaciotiempo: Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 5, no. 7: 14–29.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1942. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
Navarrete, Martín Fernandez de, ed. 1825–37. Colección de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los españoles desde fines del siglo XV: con varios documentos inéditos concernientes á la historia de la marina castellana y de los establecimientos españoles en Indias. 5 vols. Madrid: Imp. Real.
Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik. 1889. Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography with Reproductions of the Most Important Maps Printed in the XV and XVI Centuries. Translated by Johan Adolf Ekelöf and Clements R. Markham. Stockholm. Originally published as Facsimile-Atlas till Kartografiens Äldsta Historia: Innehållande Afbildningar af de vigtigaste Kartor, tryckta före År 1600 (Stockholm, 1889). Reprinted, New York: Dover, 1973.
———. 1897. Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing Directions. Translated by Francis A. Bather. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt. Originally published as Periplus: Utkast till sjokortens och sjobockernas aldsta historia (Stockholm: [Norstedt], 1897). Reprinted, New York: Burt Franklin, [1967].
Phillips, P. Lee. 1901. “A Bibliography of Cartography.” In P. Lee Phillips, A List of Maps of America in the Library of Congress, 5–90. Washington, D.C.: G.P.O. Reprinted as A List of Works Relating to Cartography (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1901).
Schulten, Susan. 1998. “Richard Edes Harrison and the Challenge to American Cartography.” Imago Mundi 50: 174–88.
———. 2001. The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sims, Douglas W. 1991. “Leo Bagrow’s Forgotten Early Survey of the Development of Cartographic Historiography.” Imago Mundi 43: 92–99.
Wroth, Lawrence C. 1944. “The Early Cartography of the Pacific.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 38, no. 2: 87–268.
Wright, J. K. [attrib.]. 1945. Review of Lawrence C. Wroth, “The Early Cartography of the Pacific,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 38, no. 2 (1944): 87–268. Geographical Review 35, no. 3: 505–6.
