French military officers and the mapping of West Africa: the case of Captain Brosselard-Faidherbe

Through the study of projects conceived to shape colonial space, this article aims to reconsider the motives and means of French colonial expansion in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The Plan Faidherbe, designed by the Governor of Senegal in the 1860s, outlined a plan for eastward development, including a road and rail link between the Senegal and the Niger Rivers (and beyond, between Algeria and Sudan). The implementation of these routes of penetration called for a number of military-led topographic missions. The study of these missions and of the maps that were produced at the time reveal how such projects and their implementation were mediated by both cartographic and field practices. The case of Captain Henry Brosselard (1855-93), General Faidherbe’s son-in-law, is an interesting example because of the diversity of the missions he led and the extent of territory which he traversed and mapped. This case also shows how, in the course of a career, an officer could assume several different functions and come to conceive the process of building colonial territory from different perspectives. This paper questions a common view of the military as having a purely strategic vision of space as a field of conquest, a view which reserves a more development-oriented outlook for civil administrators and the business community. Indeed, Brosselard’s varied career somewhat blurs the conventional divide between civilians and soldiers, requiring us to reconsider accepted ways of categorising colonial actors.     

A cartographic fade to black: mapping the destruction of urban Japan during World War II

In this paper we examine the history, production, and use – practical and rhetorical – of maps created by the United States government during World War II as related to the development and execution of aerial bombing policies against Japan. Drawing from a range of maps and primary documents culled from libraries and archives in the United States, we argue that maps provide an important, and hitherto neglected, means through which to trace the exploration and eventual embrace of the incendiary bombing of Japan’s cities. In particular, our aim is to show how maps, along with the men who made and used them, played a central role in the planning and prosecution of air raids on urban Japan. We also address the mobilization of American geographers into the war effort, the re-configuration of America’s spatial intelligence community during World War II, and the ways in which maps were constructed in the context of total war.     

Mapping geographies of Canadian colonial occupation: pathway analysis of murdered indigenous women and girls

This paper builds on scholarship within life course studies, particularly notions of pathway analysis, to demonstrate how such analysis can be combined with cartography in order to be applied to studies of missing and murdered indigenous women, as a means to better understand the geographies of violence they live and die in. In this sense, this work utilizes the theoretical underpinnings of pathways analysis but transforms it into an indigenized tool for narration and analysis, by linking the pathways studied with relationships to land, colonialism, and intergenerational violence. By telling the narratives of the women studied in this paper in this way, this paper demonstrates that the binaries that are frequently applied to missing and murdered indigenous women create popular knowledge on this violence that is not necessarily reflective of reality, and that when we look beyond or between these binaries, different patterns and sites of violence emerge.