ABSTRACT
Processual map history is more about action (mapping) than things (maps). It emphasises how people act with maps as they seek to articulate, communicate and change spatial complexities. Properly, the locus of explanation is the particular spatial discourse within which spatial texts have been produced, circulated and consumed. These discourses can be difficult to reconstruct empirically, so historical studies can instead work with the heuristic of carefully assembled threads of discourse or entire mapping modes. At root, a processual approach reveals, and revels in, the sheer diversity of spatial discourses and of the myriad inscriptive and incorporative mapping strategies they have deployed. Processual map history is thus anti-universalist in its implications, denying the common presumed existence both of a single category of phenomena that possess some mapness in common and of the universality of the bloodless technology of cartography.
