Andrew Dury's map of the present seat of war,between the Russians,Poles, and Turks (1769)

Abstract

The chance assembling of a number of different impressions of Andrew Dury's Map of the present Seat of War between the Russians, Poles, and Turks (1769) in the British Library led the authors to examine the map's carto‐bibliographical history. Nine states of the map, two of which were sometimes sold with printed paste‐ons, have been identified to date. The two earliest states of the map are now in the State Historical Museum, Moscow. Although both are best described as proof, or pre‐publication, impressions, each bears evidence of intensive use at the highest levels of the Russian army command. Indeed, the circumstances leading to the creation of the map by Andrew Dury and Peter Bell and to a succession of different versions over the three decades or so of intermittent Russian‐Turkish hostilities highlight the interplay of international politics, individual initiative and commercial factors in late eighteenth‐century map production in London.