Ships on Maps: Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe. By Richard W. Unger

Abstract

In the Reclus-Perron cartographical collection held in the Public Library of Geneva, a recently discovered map by the explorer Henri Coudreau seems to have been essential, together with other published and unpublished cartographic materials, in deciding the 1900 Swiss arbitration of the Franco-Brazilian border dispute. These materials provide an opportunity not only to analyse the political power of maps, but also to explore a different European way of conceiving maps and geography, that of anarchist geographers, which diverged from the uncritical hagiographies of colonialism and geographical discoveries that were typical in European science during the Age of Empire (1875?1914).