Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses maps of the nineteenth-century mapmaker John Arrowsmith in the map collection of the British Colonial Office. I read the maps with and against the grain of prevailing written documentation and shed light on the material histories of the maps.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation discusses the colonial map collection of the British Colonial Office, housed at the National Archives, Kew. I examine the contributions that mapmaker John Arrowsmith made to it between the 1830s and the early 1860s. During these decades Arrowsmith was the semi-official mapmaker of the Colonial Office and many of his maps accumulated into the department's collections on an ad hoc basis. They included printed maps of the colonies but also manuscript tracings and are now available for consultation bound in the volumes of correspondence and as separate map files.

At Kew the maps are stored close to much of the material that helped generate them: the colonial map tracings and survey and exploration reports that arrived from the colonies. However, these maps form only a fraction of a globally dispersed colonial map 'collection'. As commercial commodities the maps found their ways to diverse geographical settings and consequently to many collections. Many of these maps are currently highly valued collectibles.

This presentation discusses ways to read the maps with and against the grain of the prevailing written documentation. I provide a multifaceted interpretation of their position in colonial governance and analyse the contributions of different actors to their making (ranging from indigenous and settler informants to draftsmen on the mapmaker's payroll). By taking examples concerning different colonies, I discuss the cultural and material histories that the collection encloses, including disputes over 'correct' knowledge and copyright, the authority of maps as well as histories of maps that were not made.