New Map of Empire

After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution.Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.

The New Map of Empire rests on massive archival research and a close and sensitive appreciation of more than 250 maps, presented online in an ingenious digital atlas. With great clarity and force, Edelson describes how an activist Board of Trade initiated this surge of mapping to forge a new sense of the connectedness of British empire. For all their promise as tools of imperial power, Edelson shows, these maps frequently camouflaged imperial weaknesses. In their turn, American Revolutionaries were able to convert this British cartographic bonanza to their own warlike, administrative, imperial, and ideological purposes after 1776., The New Map of Empire makes a major contribution to our understanding of colonial America. Edelson has compiled an extraordinary collection of maps that illuminate the British Atlantic world, and puts them in context superbly to describe the empire’s wider cartographic history. The companion website featuring these maps is quite simply spectacular. By telling the story of the officials, surveyors, and army and navy officers who mapped America, Edelson reveals the crucial role played by the Crown in the coming of the American Revolution.

S. Max Edelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.