ABSTRACT
‘British Empire Throughout the World Exhibited in One View’ is the title of Scottish cartographer John Bartholomew Jr’s well-known and widely reproduced map, first published in The Royal Illustrated Atlas in 1860. This world map highlights British imperial territories in pink or light red, by this time the standard hue for cartographic representations of the British Empire. Tables on the upper left and right sides of the map list the various colonies and other dependencies that comprised the empire, divided into five regions (Europe, America, Asia, Australia, and Africa). Cartouches run across the top and bottom of the map, representing some of the empire’s many subjects. The upper panel shows encounters between British traders and settlers and North and South American Indians. The lower panel presents a cavalcade of peoples whose dress and features identify them as South Asians, East Asians, Africans, and others. A middle-class English couple stands at the center of this cavalcade, flanked by a tartan-clad Scot and a Royal Hussar cavalry officer. The message communicated by Bartholomew’s map is clear: The British Empire is a collaborative enterprise of global dimensions, its multiple subjects bound together by the benefits of British rule.
