Taking possession: the cartouche as cultural text in eighteenth-century American maps¹

To view ‘the history of map-making’ as ‘the record of man's attempt to understand the world he lives in’2 is to give the map a peculiarly neutral status as a form of representation. Indeed, it reinforces a sense of the map as a seemingly objective image of the land and lays stress on its basis as at once mathematical and scientific measure of the earth's surface. If, however, we see maps as a very different kind of measure; as a series of texts which do not so much ‘understand’ as image a culture's relationship with the land then we begin to see the map, as a cultural text, in something approaching its necessary ideological context. In this view maps emerge as essentially symbolic structures: collective images of the way in which cultures seek to ‘impose’ themselves ‘upon space’.3 In other words, the map exists as a text of possession: a reconstruction of a culture's way with the world.