Harley’s Understandable, but Misplaced, Criticism of Bagrow’s “History of Cartography”

Or, the Problems of Relying on an Edited Translation without Referring to the Original

update 23 Jan 2021: I have inserted a reference to Woodward (1974). 

As the sociocultural critique of maps and mapping got under way, one of the targets of critique was the manner in which traditional map history over emphasized European mapping during the Renaissance and paid little attention to the Enlightenment and effectively no attention to mapping in the period after 1800. It seemed that the field of map history had been defined by the antiquarian obsession with the old and the pretty. Michael Blakemore and Brian Harley (1980, 23–26) called this the “Old-is-Beautiful” bias. A key piece of evidence was a passage in the preface to Leo Bagrow’s History of Cartography that drew a sharp line between mapping as “works of art,” of “individual minds,” and of “craftmanship” as opposed to modern mapping as a “specialized science” and as a mechanical practice (Bagrow 1964, 22). The former was the grist for Bagrow’s mill, the latter was excluded. Bagrow’s statement seemed to express a common sentiment, that the eighteenth century was when cartography became a science, and so gave credence to the implication that the field of the history of cartography had been shaped first and foremost by antiquarian dealers and collectors, from whom the field needed to be rescued if it was to have any hope of fulfilling its intellectual potential. Harley (1987, 25–26) repeated the criticism; it was commonly rehearsed in conversations at conferences. I too used the passage to indicate the problems with existing approaches to map history (Edney 1993, 56; Edney 2005, 69).

I have, however, come to realize that Bagrow’s position was not as absolute as his preface made out. In reading the original German text, Die Geschichte der Kartographie (1951), it rapidly became apparent that the English translation had made a significant intervention that was far greater than the results of free translation. Bagrow’s own narrative was thus more complex than Anglophone map historians have realized.

In this post, I compare the 1951 German and 1964 English editions of Bagrow’s magnum opus and explain the changes to point out that the single, lineal history of cartography actually comprised at least two, competing progressive narratives.

Comparing the 1951 and 1964 Editions

Bagrow originally completed Die Geschichte der Kartographie in 1943 and it was printed in Berlin in 1944, but all copies were lost to fire (Bagrow 1951, 376). After the war, Bagrow published the work again in 1951, together with new images: 97 black-and-white maps set within the text, 112 grey-scale plates, and 8 color plates. After Bagrow’s death in 1957, the book was translated into English in 1960 by D. L. Paisey, and then edited by R. A. Skelton, superintendent of the British Museum’s map room. Skelton stated that the editing comprised “some rearrangement of Bagrow’s text,” the insertion of “a few linking passages,” and the addition of “brief notes, mainly of bibliographical character.” For the most part, Skelton indicated, the 1951 images were used, with the addition of a few from a book issued by the same publisher (in Leithäuser 1958) together with the provision of “some new ones,” otherwise unspecified (editor’s introduction in Bagrow 1964, 4–5). All told, the English translation possessed just 76 black-an-white maps in the text, 116 grey-scale plates, and 22 color plates. It would seem that still more plates were intended—another 15 monochrome and 4 color—and these were included in a further edition (Bagrow 1985).

Bagrow explained his subject matter in a short preface:

Es wird in diesem Werke erstmalig der Versuch unternommen, eine Übersicht der verschiedenen Kartentypen zu geben, ohne auf die speziellen Fragen einzugehen, wie das Material, das als Grundlage für die Karte gedient hat, beschafft worden war (topographische Aufnahme), wie dieses Material ausgewertet wurde (Projektion, Maßstab usw.) und was sich aus diesem Material in Einzelheiten ergab (historisch-geographische Analyse). Der Verfasser führt sein Werk bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts, weil erst von dieser Zeit an diese drei Frage anfangen, die erste Rolle zu spielen. Das äußere Bild der Karte, die ästhetische und kunsthandwerkliche Seite in ihrer Bedeutung für den geistigen, kulturgeschichtlichen Gehalt, auf den in diesem Werke besonderer Wert gelegt wurde, tritt nun in den Hintergrund zurück. Das künstlerische wird von der Technik abgelöst, und es wird unmöglich, das Werk fortzusetzen, ohne das bisher mit Stillschweigen Übergangene zum Hauptthema zu machen. Dabei berühren diese technischen Fragen den nicht fachlich interessierten Leser am wenigsten. (Bagrow 1951, 7)

This work makes the first attempt to give an overview of the different types of maps without going into the specific issues of how the material that forms the basis for the map was obtained (topographic survey), how this material was compiled (projection, scale, etc.), and what detailed use can be made of this material (historical-geographical analysis). The author carries his study to the middle of the eighteenth century, because these three issues then begin to dominate [in map production]. At that time, the outward image of the map—its aesthetic and craft elements, in their importance for the intellectual, cultural-historical level [of history], to which special emphasis is paid in this work—recede into the background. The artistic being replaced by the technological, it becomes impossible to continue the study without turning subjects that had hitherto been passed over in silence into the main subject. In any case, these technical issues are barely of concern to non-technically interested readers.

By contrast, in Skelton’s edition, the same passage has a quite different flavor:

This book is intended to acquaint the reader with the early maps produced in both Europe and the rest of the world, and to tell him something of their development, their makers and printers, their varieties and characteristics. Our chief concern is with the externals of maps: we exclude any examination of their content, of scientific methods of mapmaking, of the way material is collected, or of the compilation of maps. This book ends at the point where maps ceased to be works of art, the products of individual minds, and where craftsmanship was finally superseded by specialised science and the machine; this came in the second half of the eighteenth century. This book contains the history of the evolution of the early map, but not the history of modern cartography. (Bagrow 1964, 22, emphasis added)

It is a good, colloquial translation, especially compared to my own labored translation of the 1951 passage, but the parts I have italicized seem to be the result of Skelton’s interventions. Whereas Bagrow was pragmatic about the apparent changes in Enlightenment mapping, Skelton much was less flexible. He turned historical change into an eventuality (“finally superseded”) and the rise of new practices and institutions into a fundamental shift in culture and intellect. (Woodward 1974, 102, was quite confused by the results of Skelton’s edits; from his perspective, Bagrow’s book was not about the “externals” of maps, at all.)

Indeed, Skelton cut out of Bagrow’s original text parts that actually dealt with the more scientific elements of cartography! Bagrow was not, in fact, set against “scientific cartography” in the way that critics, including me, have thought from reading Skelton’s edited preface. He briefly discussed eighteenth-century innovations and in particular the rise of triangulation-based systematic surveys, in his chapter on the “century of atlases”; this placement was in line with summary histories of cartography by academics and practitioners that presented the ever-increasing collection of geographical data as requiring ever larger atlases that eventually became the organized sheets of a systematic survey (as, e.g., Stavenhagen 1904; Thiele 1938, 3–115). In doing so, Bagrow even reproduced part of a diagram of the triangulation network around Paris, apparently from a 1743 manuscript:

Skelton (1951, 164–65)

On the facing page, Bagrow placed a reproduction of the “corrected” map of France (Carte de France corrigée par ordre du roi) drawn by Jean Picard and Philippe de la Hire in the 1680s and first published in 1693 (Edney 2019, fig. 4.4). This map depicted the correction to the coastline of France made by new observations of longitude based on Jean Dominique Cassini’s implementation of the observation of the eclipses of Jupiter’s largest moon behind the body of the planet; the map actually predated the publication of Cassini’s perfected tables for field observation of longitude (1692) because the French astronomers had used simultaneous observations of the eclipses, Picard and de la Hire in the field, Cassini in the new Paris Observatory. Now, however, Bagrow obscured the map’s origins by labeling it as a “map of France before and after Cassini’s survey” (Karte von Frankreich nach alter und neuer Aufnahme von Cassini, 1693), improperly suggesting that the map derived from the terrestrial survey that would later underpin the Carte de France.

But, in Skelton’s hands, the whole passage on the French triangulation (and also Snellius’s early seventeenth-century triangulation in the Netherlands) disappeared entirely. The triangulation diagram was also cut. The corrected map of France was kept, but Skelton relocated it to the last chapter, where it sat undigested and unreferenced. I’ll have more to say about this relocation in the next section.

It is clear that, regardless of the correctness of his treatment, Bagrow was not himself against “scientific cartography” or unafraid of talking about more modern cartographic practices. He was, after all, a trained navigator and hydrographer. Bagrow’s overall approach—albeit obscured by the organizational complexity of the book—is very much in line with the view of the history of cartography developed in the nineteenth century. In this established narrative structure, Western cartography passed through a series of epochs, of which the Renaissance was most important because it marked the birth of a new rationality and mentality. The long eighteenth century was a period of transition from old forms of geography to modern cartography, the latter being the proper preserve of professional and academic map makers rather than map historians.

By stripping out the triangulation material and by reframing the work’s overall intent, Skelton made Bagrow’s narrative agree with the recently advanced narrative that the history of cartography was the history of how an art became a science, even if it inverted the narrative’s triumphal rhetoric to sustain the disjuncture between cartography and historical cartography. That Skelton thought in terms of the art-to-science narrative is sustained by his relocation of the image of the “corrected” map of France.

Relocating the “Corrected” Map of France

If it’s not yet apparent, Bagrow’s Die Geschichte der Kartographie is somewhat disorganized. His short, last chapter, on the “The Map as a Work of Craft and of Art” (Die Ksrte als Kunstwerke und Bildwerk), dealt mostly with the different physical forms of maps (atlases, engraved on silver, hung on walls, used as decoration, and also typographic printing), but it begins with a paragraph on the place of decoration and iconography in ear.y maps:

Die Bedeutung der Karte im menschlichten Leben ist groß. Wenn man annimmt, daß die Karte als Endziel und Endergebnis aller geographischen Forschung, Entdeckung oder als ein Mittel erscheint, die Erdoberfläche darzustellen, die Erde in Form eines Bild vorzuführen, so ist es vollkommen verständlich, daß die alten Kartographen danach strebten, dies Bild wirklich künstlerisch zu gestalten. Das wurde mitunter sogar unwillkürlich dadurch hervorgerufen, daß es erforderlich erschien, auf der Karte außer den speziellen symbolischen kartographiscne Bezeichnungen auch eine bildliche Darstellung der Einzelheiten anzubringen: Abbildungen von Tieren, Pflanzen, Menschen, letztere oft in ihrem Volksleben, des weiteren Landschaften, Städteansichten usw. Alles dies ließ sich bei der alten Karte um so leichter durchführen, als die Fläche dieser Karte hierfür noch genügend Raum bot, da sie noch nicht mit Einzelheiten oft noch wenig erforschter Gegenden überfüllt  war. Je weniger bekannt ein Land ist, um so mehr sind freie weiße Flecken bei ihrer Darstellung auf der Karte vorhanden, und um so stärker erscheint die Notwendigkeit, nicht nur diese Flecken auszufüllen, sondern auch durch die Zeichnung die charaketeristischen Einzelheiten des Landes und seiner Natur aufzuzeigen, was sich durch die symbolisch bedingten Bezeichnungen nicht erreichen läßt. Und vollkommen gerechtfertigt erscheint ser Spottvers des englischen Satyrikers Swift auf die Kartographen, die die Karte neben dem Text mit zahlreichen Abbildungen anfüllen:

“Geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps
And over inhabitable [sic] downs
Place elephants, for want of towns.” (Bagrow 1951, 199)

Maps are of great importance in human life. Whether they are considered as the end-product of geographic research and discovery, or a means of representing the surface of the earth in the form of a picture, it is perfectly understandable that early cartographers strove to make that picture really artistic. This was sometimes even spontaneously brought about by the apparent requirement to place pictorial representations—of animals, plants, people (often in scenes from daily life), landscapes, and cityscapes, etc.—in addition to representation through special cartographic symbols. It was all the easier to do this with early maps: they generally offered enough space for pictorial details because areas that remained little explored were not yet filled in by details. The less well known a country is, the more blank spaces were available to be filled and the greater was the need not only to fill in these blanks but also to give a sense of the nature of the country when cartographic symbols were insufficient. And the mocking verse of the English satirist Swift, on cartographers who fill the map with numerous illustrations beside the text, seems perfectly justified:

So Geographers in Afric-maps
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
And o’er unhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.

This famous quatrain by Jonathan Swift has several readings (Edney 2018). In the context of Swift’s poem, it is a figurative complaint, complete with Classical allusions, about the practice of hack writers to overfill their poetry with distracting imagery. Bagrow, like others in the first half of the twentieth century, took the quatrain at face value, as a literal statement of the practice of map makers to fill gaps in maps with pictures and decoration.

Others, however, dwelled more on the satirical and mocking aspect of the quatrain. It seems to be censorious, to be objecting to the practice, and as such it has been taken as marking the emergence of a new, scientific ethos in mapping. This figurative interpretation of cartographic practice was first made by Erwin Raisz (1938), an academic cartographer at Harvard, who in 1938 used the quatrain as a key element in his argument that the eighteenth century was a pivotal period in that it was when cartography ceased to be an art and became a science. After World War II, other map historians were motivated by the huge strides then being made in mapping to reflect at length upon how cartography had attained its contemporary degree of perfection. They adopted Raisz’s art-to-science narrative. In particular, G. R. Crone advanced the narrative in his Maps and Their Makers (1953).

Crone was a close colleague of Skelton’s, and Skelton had already relied on Crone’s small book for his essay on the development of cartographic technologies after 1750 (Skelton 1958). Skelton has also imbibed a variant of the art-to-science narrative in the form of J. K. Wright’s (1947) concept of “geosophy” (the study of geographical knowledge) as entailing a progressive replacement of geographical information with experiential knowledge (see Skelton 1965).

In editing Bagrow’s last chapter, which he now called a postscript, Skelton subtly edited the paragraph leading up to Swift’s quatrain to emphasize that the presence of decoration in early maps was a necessity. And then he inserted, as noted above, on the following page and otherwise unremarked, the “corrected” map of France (Bagrow 1964, 215, 216). This map has no relevance to the subject matter of the rest of the final chapter/postscript. Its presence can only be explained, to my mind, by its great significance for the art-to-science narrative. The “corrected” map was first highlighted by Christian Sandler (1905) as the emblem of the reformation in the world map that took place because of the introduction of the method of determining longitude from the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites. Sandler called his book Die Reformation der Kartographie, actually referencing older ideas about the “reformation of geography” (as early as Robert de Vaugondy 1755, 129), but this phrase would become chapter titles for both Raisz (1938) and Crone (1953). Crone (1953, 129) also reproduced the “corrected” map of France as the only image in his chapter on “the Reformation of cartography in France” and, with Lloyd Brown (1949, 147), began the proliferation of reproductions of the map as the emblem of the scientific reform of cartography in the eighteenth century (Edney 2015, 609). By keeping Bagrow’s incorrect title to the map, which related it to its improper usage by the other map historians, and by placing it in close proximity to Swift’s quatrain, Skelton referred once more to the art-to-science narrative. (I have no idea how he thought the non-expert reader would understand the reproduction of the “corrected” map of France.)

Bagrow seems not to have shared the modernist sensibilities that drove Raisz, Crone, Brown, Skelton, and others to write histories of cartography so as to explain the contemporary triumph of cartography. He was thus unmoved by the art-to-science narrative. His take on the history of cartography was an old-fashioned one. Skelton sought to bring his narrative more in line with recent intellectual developments. I really am not sure that, contrary to Skelton’s claim, Bagrow would actually have appoved of his editorial interventions.

Works Cited

Bagrow, Leo. 1951. Die Geschichte der Kartographie. Berlin: Safari-Verlag.

———. 1964. The History of Cartography. Translated by D. L. Paisey. Edited by R. A. Skelton. London: C. A. Watts.

———. 1985. The History of Cartography. Translated by D. L. Paisey. Edited by R. A. Skelton. 2nd ed. Chicago: Precedent Publishing.

Blakemore, Michael J., and J. B. Harley. 1980. Concepts in the History of Cartography: A Review and Perspective. Cartographica 17, no. 4: Monograph 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Brown, Lloyd A. 1949. The Story of Maps. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Crone, G. R. 1953. Maps and Their Makers: An Introduction to the History of Cartography. London: Hutchinson.

Edney, Matthew H. 1993. “Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30, nos. 2–3: 54–68.

———. 2005. The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories. Cartographica 40, nos. 1–2: Monograph 54. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

———. 2015. “Histories of Cartography.” In Cartography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Monmonier, 607–14. Vol. 6 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2018. “A Misunderstood Quatrain.” mappingasprocess.net (15 December 2018).

———. 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and Its History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harley, J. B. 1987. “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography.” In Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by J. B. Harley, and David Woodward, 1–42. Vol. 1 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leithäuser, J. G. 1958. Mappae Mundi. Berlin: Safari-Verlag.

Raisz, Erwin. 1938. General Cartography. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Robert de Vaugondy, Didier. 1755. Essai sur l’histoire de la géographie, ou sur son origine, ses progrès et son état actuel. Paris: Antoine Boudet. Reprinted as “Préface historique dans laquelle on traite de l’origine, des progrès, et de l’état actuel de la géographie,” in Atlas universel (Paris: Antoine Boudet, 1757).

Sandler, Christian. 1905. Die Reformation der Kartographie um 1700. Munich: R. Oldenbourg.

Skelton, R. A. 1958. “Cartography.” In The Industrial Revolution, c 1750 to c 1850, edited by Charles Singer, 596–628. Vol. 4 of The History of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 1965. Looking at an Early Map: The Annual Public Lecture on Books and Bibliography, University of Kansas, October 1962. University of Kansas Publications, Library Series 17. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Stavenhagen, W. 1904. Skizze der Entwicklung und des Standes des Kartenwesens des ausserdeutschen Europa. Petermanns Mitteilungen, Ergänzungsheft 148. Gotha: Justus Perthes.

Thiele, Walter. 1938. Official Map Publications: A Historical Sketch, and a Bibliographical Handbook of Current Maps and Mapping Services in the United States, Canada, Latin America, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Certain Other Countries. Chicago: American Library Association.

Woodward, David. 1974. “The Study of the History of Cartography: A Suggested Framework.” American Cartographer 1: 101–15.

Wright, J. K. 1947. “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37: 1–15.