The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence

by S. Max Edelson

After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution.

Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces―their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce―and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.

Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the new world. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.

Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Geography, American Revolution, Cartography

420 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 2017

About the author

A specialist in the history of colonial British America and the Atlantic world, Max Edelson is professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fascinating to me, partly because it is exactly in my wheelhouse subject-wise. But even more importantly, this is a book about maps that comes with a website where Edelson put ALL the maps. This is kind of a blessing and a curse for the book - it is a blessing because typically an author would just pick a dozen or so representative maps for the book, which would invariably leave out some interesting ones. But it is a curse because I had to read the book next to my computer. I always wanted to see the maps Edelson was writing about, and I knew that I could see each and every one on the website. So I would get distracted by these maps, and lose the thread a bit in the book.
But really, the fact that all the maps are available outweighs any problems. This worked very well for me as a lecturer too, because I love using maps to illustrate to my students what people knew about geography at different times, and how they used maps to try and make claims and conceptualize space, and that is basically the entire purpose of this book. You just have to try and read a whole chapter before looking at all the maps for that chapter, so as not to get sidetracked.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is certainly an interesting and ambitious project. There's some really interesting things happening here, but unfortunately it's so dense that it's hard to keep track of everything. This is definitely a gold mine for British Empirical & Colonial studies, but this is NOT intended for a layperson by any stretch of the imagination.

The online component with maps is interesting and cleverly done, but I struggle to see how this book stands alone without the maps. What happens when that website becomes so outdated and obsolete that it's no longer supported by its host? There will come a time when this website is no longer accessible, and I struggle to see how this book will fare at that point.

[Yunis · Rating 4 out of 5]

S. Max Edelson work is tremendous and gives lot of imagery of British plan in the Americas. This is the first time I read a book that revolves on extensive relationship to extensive understanding of maps. I understand that the author would not had the time to get permissions to post all of the maps image and the size of would not have allowed for the maps to be printed. The story of this book is the story of maps and with the help of the authors map reference I was able to get a glimpse of what the British intended for their colonies.

[Jesus]

Maps are available here: http://mapscholar.org/empire/