ABSTRACT
Cartography has both helped and hindered empires from earliest early modernity to postmodernity. Imperial formations developed in conjunction with particular mapping projects, which acted as instruments of violence, extraction, and dispossession, facilitating vast inequalities and iniquities. But maps have never been under the exclusive control of narrowly defined imperial elites; instead they have drawn on the knowledge and labour of subject peoples and remained open to unexpected and resistant repurposing. Scholarship of recent decades has investigated spatial representations’ power as a variable and relative quality rather than one to be taken for granted. This chapter presents a global and broadly chronological overview of imperial cartographies from the fifteenth century to the present, from early-modern globes and world maps, through increasingly expansive imperial surveys and cartographic bureaucracies, on to the malleable spatial technologies of the contemporary world. Maps shaped how empires governed, grew, and declined; empires shaped what maps displayed, their material forms, and who used them. The chapter casts light on how these processes took diverse forms not only between but also within empires, often exceeding and reframing the expectations of the many people—colonisers and colonised, producers and viewers—who had a stake in maps.
