The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century: Power, State and Territory

By John Rennie Short

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. These national atlases mirror and embody some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the geography of biopolitics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839983054

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The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century

The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century

Power, State and Territory

John Rennie Short

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © John Rennie Short 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932343

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-303-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-303-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

A Century of Nationalism

The Main Arguments

Structure of the Book

2 The Early National Atlas

A Cartographic Explosion

The Early National Atlas in England and France

3 Cartographic Anxieties and the Emergence of the Modern National Atlas

The Modern National Atlas in Latin America

From Anxieties to Certainties

Remaining Anxieties

4 Cartographic Ruptures and the National Atlas

Cartographic Declarations of Independence

Revolutionary Ruptures

A Transect across the Ruptures

5 National Atlas, Global Discourses

The Global Framing of the National

The Language of the Atlas: Text

The Language of the Atlas: Maps

6 The Physical World of the National Atlas

Origins

Science, State and the National Atlas

National Imaginaries

Contested Discourses of the National Atlas

7 The Social World of the National Atlas

Social Statistics

Statistical Atlases

Social Categories

8 The End of the National Atlas?

Information Overload

New Technologies

National Atlas as Digital Portal

Toward a Polyphonic Participatory Atlas

Notes

Appendix: National Atlas Bibliography

Index

List of Figures

LIST OF TABLES

Acknowledgments

I first started the research for this book an embarrassingly long time ago. I started working on the idea of the book 20 years ago. Yes, that long ago. I pursued the matter more intensively, when in 2009 I was awarded a Helen and John S. Best Fellowship to work on national atlases at the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. During my time there, the then curator Chris Baruth made me feel most welcome. It was a pleasure to spend a summer month in the AGS Library. It was a good start. But more research was needed. When I returned to my home in Maryland, I started to visit the Library of Congress (LOC) map collection more often than my previous occasional visits. The LOC is not only one of the bibliographic wonders of the world; it is an unparalleled cartographic treasure trove. The Geography and Map Division holds the most comprehensive collection of atlases anywhere in the world, more than 53,000 atlases. It is a rich treasure house for cartographic research. My occasional visits were all too rare as the teaching and other research activities took up my energies. Anyway, I loved the archival research so much that I was in no hurry to finish.

We moved to Washington, DC, in 2013. There were many reasons for the move and the final choice was based on many factors, but not the least was the location. Our new home was only a brisk 15-minute walk from the LOC. I could and did visit more often. Yet the cartographic riches of the LOC meant that there was always one more atlas to consult, one more edition to check. My privileged position allowed me to keep researching. The research, as I came to realize, was becoming less a means to an end and more of a pleasurable experience in its own right.

The staff at the Geography and Map Reading Room was enormously helpful. I am very grateful to the support and encouragement shown by previous chiefs of the division, John R. Hebert and Ralph Ehrenberg. The staff not only met my bibliographic requests but also made suggestions and provided advice. Edward Redmond was always suggesting another edition of a volume when a specific call number proved elusive. Anthony Mullen shared his knowledge of Spanish language atlases and guided me on the path of looking at the nineteenth-century national atlases of Mexico, Peru and Venezuela as little-known forerunners of the European national atlases of the twentieth century. Ryan Moore freely shared his encyclopedic knowledge of an early Polish atlas. One afternoon, as I pored over the Eugeniusz Romer 1916 atlas of Poland, he very graciously guided me through the text in front of us for over an hour, sharing his deep knowledge of the text.

At the invitation of Tom Sander, I gave a talk at to the Washington Map Society in February 2016 on my research. A version of the talk was printed later that year in the Society’s journal, The Portolan. The presentation and published essay were opportunities to gather my research notes and structure a narrative in lecture and print form.

The COVID-19 pandemic halted my visits to the LOC. Stuck at home during the pandemic I was more fortunate than most as it meant that while my archival research was stymied, I could devote more time writing up my research.

In turning the research into this text more debts were incurred. Megan Greiving at Anthem Press was an early supporter of the project and answered my many queries about illustrations with remarkable calm. I am very fortunate to have received tremendous support from my institution, the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). It came in a variety of forms. My research assistant, Abbey Farmer, carefully read through the manuscript more than once and helped with the index. To meet the costs of publication I received generous support from a variety of funds. I received a UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship Small Research Grant. I also received financial support from two other UMBC sources, the Dresher Center’s Scholarly Completion Fund and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science Dean’s Research Fund. The director of the School of Public Policy, Professor Nancy Miller, was a steadfast supporter of my research and scholarship, over many years. Thank you, Nancy, for everything.

I have also been fortunate with anonymous reviewers. The publisher sent out both the proposal and a completed text to reviewers who made many good suggestions. The two reviewers of the full manuscript deserve a special thanks for a careful and sympathetic reading that improved the text.

I have drawn upon the visual material of a wide variety of atlases to provide the illustrations in this book. It has proved enormously difficult to obtain copyright permissions to reproduce the images that I photographed during my archival research at the AGS Map Library and LOC. The national atlas is a complex text with multiple authors, and a diverse set of institutions are involved in its production and reproduction—some of them only for the duration of the project. Even for the more recent atlases it proved impossible to identify let alone contact the original copyright holders. So, this is an acknowledgment of my reliance on the work of others to produce the images used in this book. I will be delighted in subsequent editions to provide acknowledgment of all copyright holders who come forward.

I think it was Paul Valery, who noted that books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. For many the leave-taking is a source of relief, even joy. Not in my case. The book you have before you was reluctantly finished. Rather than relief, I have a sense of loss. I can only hope that my loss is your gain.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A useful working definition of a national atlas is a generally comprehensive, officially sanctioned single-country atlas.¹ The publication of Atlas öfver Finland (Atlas of Finland) in 1899 marks the beginning of the modern national atlas since it has all the main attributes of subsequent national atlases produced over the course of the next 100 years (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). These include

a comprehensive and official, or officially sanctioned text.

a symbol and embodiment of national identity.

a tool for government to inventory, classify and depict the national territory.

a text aimed at multiple and extended audiences including the international scientific community as well as a domestic readership.

a part of the ideological apparatus for education into, and promotion of, citizenship.

a display of the biopolitics of the state in its depiction and classification of the population.

a depiction of national space that also makes global connections.

Figure 1.1 Cover, Atlas öfver Finland (Atlas of Finland), 1899. Source: Photo by John Rennie Short.

Figure 1.2 Diagram, Atlas öfver Finland (Atlas of Finland), 1899. The text, in both Finnish and Swedish, refers to the export of timber products from sawmills to different countries. Source: Photo by John Rennie Short.

The heyday of the national atlas coincides approximately with the twentieth century.² The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory; the rise of state-sponsored science; the full emergence of biopolitics; the active creation of a national identity; and the development of mass literacy and state education, in general and cartographic literacy in particular. Nation-states did not simply emerge. They were actively created and managed and the national atlas was an integral part of nation-making. The rise of the modern national atlas and its changing form provides an intriguing window into the connections between nation-state, science, territory and power.

The national atlas is a complex text. It is a scientific document, a tool of legitimation, a spatial claim, a textual appropriation of territory and an attempt to foster, encourage and create a national community. The national atlas is an attempt to represent and legitimize the territory of the state for both an internal and external audience; it is an element in national ideological constructions encased in global scientific discourses. I aim to unfold these complex layers of the national atlas.

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. I consider the reasons behind and the characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. The primary material for this study is a close reading of the national atlases of 40 countries from across the world. They are shown in Table 1.1 and a more detailed bibliography is provided in the Appendix. In many cases I looked at multiple editions of the same national atlas to ascertain changing assumptions and shifting discourses. This is not a sample in the strict statistical sense but in the more general sense of a wide range of countries from rich to poor, progressive to regressive and capitalist to (at the time) communist.

Table 1.1 National Atlases.

A Century of Nationalism

The twentieth century was a century of nationalism. As old empires collapsed, new nation-states emerged in revolutionary ruptures and postcolonial emergences to create a patchwork of fledgling nation-states across the globe. In 1900, there were only 57 independent countries, 70 by 1930, and by 2000, the United Nations had 189 members.

The world splintered as old empires collapsed and were dismembered. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, for