On October 7, 1763 King George III issued a proclamation that divided the territory in North America that Britain had recently won from France in the Seven Years’ War. The proclamation established, in theory, a boundary between the established British colonies east of the Appalachian Mountains and the territory possessed by Native Americans west of the mountains. According to traditional interpretations, the king issued the proclamation with the intention of imposing peace, enraging colonists hoping to expropriate and settle on native land in the process. This became one of the earliest grievances for those colonists who would rebel over the next decade, eventually declaring independence in 1776. S. Max Edelson's The New Map of Empire, a powerful and important new study of British imperialism and cartography, complicates this traditional narrative in profound ways.
On one level, The New Map of Empire is an institutional history of the Board of Trade's efforts to make sense of the vastly enhanced empire that Britain possessed at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Edelson argues persuasively that the Board of Trade, created in 1696, played a crucial role in conceptualizing and reforming the British Empire between 1763 and the end of the American War of Independence in 1783. It did so by overseeing a program that sought to systematically map Britain's overseas empire. Edelson demonstrates the degree to which maps were the tools of empire and imperial control. He surveys the hundreds of maps created or collected by the Board of Trade after 1763 and argues that they constitute an attempt to create a spatial representation of the empire. In so doing, the Board of Trade sought not just to represent the empire but also to assert control and order over distant lands.
Edelson considers the British efforts to map five regions in greater North America during the 1760s and 1770s: the maritime northeast; the trans-Appalachian west, the eastern Caribbean, Florida, and the Gulf Coast. This regional approach is one of the strengths of The New Map of Empire. Edelson shows that imperial cartographers created maps for different purposes depending on the region they were seeking to represent. Map-makers in the maritime northeast, for example, sought to demonstrate, with limited success, that Nova Scotia was ideal for settlement. Those in the eastern Caribbean, by contrast, asserted British claims within the Atlantic plantation economy which depended on enslaved labor.
The result is a variegated picture of the scale and scope of British imperial pretensions on the eve of the American Revolution. Edelson's choice of regions is a welcome riposte to studies that focus exclusively on the “thirteen colonies” that declared independence in 1776. He reminds his readers that the British Empire was vast and encompassed more than those thirteen (populous) wayward colonies. Indeed, he shows that the effort to map the empire beyond the seaboard colonies was part of a broader effort to reform and give order to the wider empire. He writes, “To take possession of these new territories and to create a well-defined edge to the North American mainland colonies, it [the Board of Trade] initiated a vast program of surveying and mapmaking designed to reveal the natures of unfamiliar lands” (341). Paradoxically, and Edelson is especially insightful in recognizing this, the effort to impose order on the vast expanse of the wider empire contributed to the alienation of mainland colonies that later declared independence: “Its struggle to impose a particular spatial order on America generated its own undoing, which went beyond a contribution to the general discontent that drove colonial protest” (12). Map-making, the technology of empire, was itself a factor that led to the partial dissolution of the British Empire in 1783.
The New Map of Empire is a model of scholarship. It is deeply researched. Edelson seems to have examined every map collected by or produced by the Board of Trade during the period in question. (Kudos to Edelson, Harvard University Press, and the relevant archives for making these available on a companion website. This is wonderful supplement to the book.) It is an engaging and beautifully written study. It should be read by all students of the British Empire during the eighteenth century, as well as those interested in the American Revolution. Which brings me back the Proclamation Line of 1763. Edelson shows that the proclamation was not simply an ad hoc response to conflict between settlers and indigenous people that inadvertently set in train the events that led to the American Revolution. On the contrary, it was part of systematic and comprehensive program to map and represent the empire, all the while transforming how imperial lands were organized and governed. This, in turn, alienated many mainland colonists, resulting in revolution and independence. Seen this way, there is something quixotic and a little bit tragic about the efforts of officials in London seeking to map an empire when the very act of doing so undermined that empire. Rather than impose order on distant lands, The New Map of Empire shows, imperial mapping fostered imperial disorder and the emergence of an aggressive republic in North America. That new republic was committed to geographic expansion, and one of its first acts was to map its, and neighboring, territory.
