Long-standing historical debates on the alleged depopulation of parts of south-eastern Africa in the period between 1820 and 1835 may well have been affected by the use of pre-1850 maps, published before scientific surveys of the interior had been conducted. Much of the geographical and demographic information inscribed on the early maps was obtained from accounts of missionaries and casual travellers rather than from surveys. All the maps produced during those years appear to share a significant mistake by which the headwaters of the Limpopo River system are shown as rising about 130 to 150 kilometres east of where they ought to be. The result was the excision of territory containing significant African chiefdoms and tens of thousands of people. Boers proceeding on their Great Trek on to the South African highveld, British officials making policy and later historians appear to have made miscalculations based on these maps. Study of the early nineteenth-century maps can also shed light on recent historical controversies about South Africa's mfecane and the impact of the Indian Ocean slave trade on Africans of the highveld.
...More
Article
Jones, Adam;
Voigt, Isabel;
(2012)
“Just a First Sketchy Makeshift”: German Travellers and Their Cartographic Encounters in Africa, 1850--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB001200591/)
Article
Sara Albuquerque;
(2022)
A complementary note to Welwitsch's map of travellers in Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB292349978/)
Book
Ramaswamy, Sumathi;
(2010)
The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India
(/isis/citation/CBB001212309/)
Article
Watson, Ruth;
(2008)
Cordiform Maps since the Sixteenth Century: The Legacy of Ninteenth-Century Classificatory Systems
(/isis/citation/CBB000931593/)
Chapter
Simon Szreter;
(2021)
The Epidemiologic Transition Turned Upside down: Britain’s Mortality History as an Imaginative Resource for Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB360643935/)
Article
Massing, Andreas;
(2009)
Mapping the Malagueta Coast: A History of the Lower Guinea Coast, 1460--1510 through Portuguese Maps and Accounts
(/isis/citation/CBB001032499/)
Article
Patrick Gautier Dalché;
(2021)
Les cartes des manuscrits de Salluste
(/isis/citation/CBB443557295/)
Book
Wulf Bodenstein;
(2019)
Die Wandkarte von Afrika des Nicolas de Fer aus dem Jahre 1705
(/isis/citation/CBB741522247/)
Article
Lefebvre, Camille;
(2011)
We Have Tailored Africa: French Colonialism and the “Artificiality” of Africa's Borders in the Interwar Period
(/isis/citation/CBB001034145/)
Book
El Shakry, Omnia S.;
(2007)
The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
(/isis/citation/CBB000950225/)
Article
Krokar, James P.;
(2008)
New Means to an Old End: Early Modern Maps in the Service of an Anti-Ottoman Crusade
(/isis/citation/CBB000931587/)
Article
Peter Barber;
(2020)
'Context is everything ... ': Ruminations on Developments in the History of Cartography since the 1970s and Their Consequences
(/isis/citation/CBB365180358/)
Article
Edney, Matthew H.;
(2015)
A Content Analysis of Imago Mundi, 1935--2010
(/isis/citation/CBB001551607/)
Book
Knowles, Anne Kelly;
(2008)
Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship
(/isis/citation/CBB000951025/)
Chapter
Edney, Matthew;
(2012)
Field/Map: A Historiographic Review and Reconsideration
(/isis/citation/CBB001210275/)
Article
Withers, Charles W. J.;
(2004)
Mapping the Niger, 1798-1832: Trust, Testimony and `Ocular Demonstration' in the Late Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB000470434/)
Article
Bederman, Sanford H.;
(1992)
The Royal Geographical Society, E.G. Ravenstein, and A map of eastern equatorial Africa--1877-1883
(/isis/citation/CBB000056443/)
Article
Kretschmer, Ingrid;
(2009)
Die Österreichische Kongo-Expedition, 1885--1887: Ziele und Kartenergebnisse
(/isis/citation/CBB001024649/)
Book
Adrian S. Wisnicki;
(2019)
Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB998942839/)
Article
Bassett, Thomas J.;
(1994)
Cartography and empire building in 19th-century West Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB000042053/)
Be the first to comment!