ABSTRACT
Bernhard Klein detects a faultline in surveying between a geometric aesthetic of circulation – ‘the idiom of the market’ – and the particularities of authority, custom and place which define ‘the integrity of the estate’. Both Andrew McRae and Klein emphasize the ambivalent nature of The Surveyor’s Dialogue, describing it as ‘tangled in a web of anxieties and uncertainties’, and ‘fraught with ideological tensions’, and tracing in it a faultline between the ‘idiom of value and profit’ and a ‘residual feudal terminology’. Contemporary with John Norden’s apparently ambivalent definition of the surveyor’s role, the dialectical nature of the Walker surveys, like that of Norden’s manual, is by no means unique to the very early seventeenth century. Public geographies were undoubtedly driven by a Baconian impulse to generate knowledge and thereby profitable improvement through disciplined investigation and dominion over American soil.
