ABSTRACT

The representation of human habitation on the maps of the sixteenth century reflects something of the period's complex adjudication between competing knowledge systems. I have argued that this adjudication has implications for the people of the global south. But it is not only the images themselves that perform this imaginative work. Cartography's seemingly dispassionate inscriptions – unambiguous lines drawn with graphic certitude – provide a sense of global measurement and the geographical coordinates with which the people of “the southern climates” might be positioned.