ABSTRACT
Territorial surveys provide a mechanism for government officials and private individuals to imagine that they can see distant landscapes, understand them, assess their worth, and determine means to improve them. The Ordnance Survey (OS) broadly exemplifies the general trend, at least in industrialized nations, for systematic surveys over time to grow more detailed and more integrated with the needs of civil government. In emulation of the Carte de France, French authorities undertook triangulations and detailed military surveys of conquered territories throughout the Napoleonic wars. The sixteenth-century surveys were reprinted, and perhaps updated, and some new provincial surveys produced. In the eighteenth century, the rapidly developing engineering and military needs of the burgeoning European economies sustained a new round of intensive chorographical mapping at much larger scales than previous work. In the USA, constitutional distinctions between federal and state authorities, together with the institutional weakness of the federal government before 1860, significantly confused mapping efforts.
