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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Writing the Land: French Imperial and Colonial Mapping of West Africa, 1854-1892

Writing the Land: French Imperial and Colonial Mapping of West Africa, 1854-1892

Bassett, Thomas J.

Hardcover

African HistoryCartographyGeography

PREORDER - Expected ship date April 22, 2027

ISBN10: 0226855015
ISBN13: 9780226855011
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Apr 22 2027
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.00
Language: English

Reveals the intertwined nature of imperial mapping and map history through the making of the colony of French Soudan in nineteenth-century West Africa.

Thomas J. Bassett's Writing the Land argues that mapping played a key role in France's territorial conquest of Africa, and that the process of imperial expansion and colonization shaped map history by influencing how maps were constructed, circulated, and used. Analyzing military and surveying campaigns over half a century in an area that became the colony of French Soudan, Bassett focuses on the social and spatial problems that surveyors and mapmakers tried to solve in the process of territorial conquest, as well as the conflicts that arose as they pursued their goals.

In their efforts to obtain this territory, French military leaders, cartographers, and expedition members came into continual contact with local Africans, with whom they negotiated and clashed. Often, imperial officers relied on intermediaries to navigate West African geography, drawing on the knowledge of political authorities, interpreters, guides, and long-distance traders; the maps they produced are inextricable from these interactions. Ultimately, Bassett claims, examining the processes of mapping in the context of these encounters leads us to understand these maps anew as Euro-African constructions, ones that emerge from a complex process of exchange and domination.

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