Landscapes of conflict: cartography and empire in northeastern America, 1680-1713

This dissertation examines the relationship between cartography and empire in New France, New England, and New York during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. It begins as English and French imperial officials were attempting to transplant state cartographic practices and spatial epistemologies into their colonies during the 1680s. Before these years, metropolitan officials responsible for colonial policy did not actively solicit maps depicting the northeastern colonies beyond perhaps visiting the shop of a local map copyist or printer. Mostly they were content with whatever happened to cross their paths, even while knowing that the people providing maps usually expected something in return. In the 1680s both French and English imperial officials, wishing to centralize colonial affairs, began supplementing this patronage model by sending mapmakers and cartographically sophisticated governors to northeastern America and instructing them to send maps back to Whitehall or Versailles. Consequently, this was a period of boundary making and contestation, processes that played out between empires, peoples, colonies, and even landholders. These policies also empowered a wide range of geographic mediators—ranging from Iroquois delegates who navigated the continental interior to local notables in Maine who held sway over Boston surveyors—who had their own, frequently violent agendas. ❧ Rooted in a desire to order natural, social, and political environments, the European imperialist impulse to map and thereby mark territory in northeastern America contributed to a quarter century of warfare between English, French, Iroquois, and Wabanaki polities as well as upheaval within each of these societies. These wars catalyzed the movement of people within northeastern America, which created informal storehouses of geographic knowledge that could be translated into cartographic formats. Spies, captives, and mapmakers travelling in enemy territory used their observations to craft geographic narratives while military campaigns into interstitial spaces fostered geographic exchanges between Natives and the European allies who depended upon their knowledge. While some wars have united people within a given society against a perceived external threat, these wars exaggerated fault lines already existing within Native and European societies. Political officials in North America used maps as tools to frame these internal conflicts for imperial audiences at Whitehall and Versailles.