Coding Empires: Cartography and Forms of Knowledge in Nineteenth Century China

My book project examines the connections between imperialism, visuality, and technical knowledge in nineteenth-century Sino-western relations. It centers the creation, transmission, and reception of spatial images—territorial surveys, topographical maps, atlases, nautical charts, and landscape photography—in the Qing, German, and British empires. It is informed by the research group’s themes in two ways. First, the project examines cartographic form as both a transhistorical and transcultural category of analysis. Second, it considers the material and political processes that are embedded within and afforded by these forms. Maps are ‘coded objects’ in that they reside at the intersection of epistemology and representation, form and function. The geographic data coded within them is often only extractable by assimilating what art historian Michael Baxandall calls “the period eye.” This means that to get to the message encoded within the map, we must also consider culturally relative modes of perception and interpretation. For example, the conversion of grid and scale into distance and time may require not only mathematical and linguistic know-how, but what Baxandall calls “cognitive style”. Materiality and making also play an important role in the coding and de-coding process. In addition to sheet maps created through reproductive technologies such as woodblock printing, lithography, and copperplate engraving, some genres of Chinese maps took the form of aesthetic objects that invite contemplation and bodily engagement. Thought of in more expansive terms, cartography encompasses different kinds of images and objects that are connected to a set of techniques and actions.

The objects and techniques I examine did not develop in isolation, nor were the actions without consequence. This project is situated in the geo-temporal space of nineteenth-century China because it was a pivotal moment of cultural confluence and political tumult, including civil war and the erosion of Qing sovereignty by foreign empires. The cultural techniques that developed in the process were informed by overlapping spheres of imperialism and concepts of modernity. Taken together, Coding Empires aspires to construct a visual epistemology, one that connects imperial science with aesthetic production in the nineteenth century.