Mapping, Remapping and Unmapping − D’Anville, Cartography and Stories of Empire

Amongst the million and counting museum collection objects held in Glasgow Museums Resource Centre − a storage facility accessible to the public through booked tours − are the Cartes Geographiques de M D’Anville, a significant collection of original maps produced in the 1700s by Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697−1782). With an interest in geography dating to his youth, by the middle of the century d’Anville was considered such an expert cartographer that his maps were copied (in modern terms, plagiarised) and published in Great Britain. Refusing to include unverified details, d’Anville was known not only for painstaking accuracy but, unusually, also for leaving in his maps blank areas when information about them could not be confirmed. D’Anville’s maps highlight how maps shift and change rather than serving as objective portrayals of a landscape.

France, like Britain, sent explorers to the so-called ‘New World’ to claim land and natural resources such as timber, as well as fur and pelts to be sold in Europe as luxuries. At the midpoint of the century France loosely controlled areas in much of present eastern Canada, the middle-west of North America, the Caribbean and north-east South America, and several cities in India. All these locations caused conflict with Great Britain, with cartography a crucial element in enforcing dominion over vast territories very far from an empire’s centre. Today, d’Anville’s maps open a window into the competing empires of Britain and France.

D’Anville’s skills and dedication were noticed early, and he gained the patronage of the King of France (by age 22 he was tutor to the young Louis XV), three generations of the Dukes of Orleans, and even the government of Portugal. With their backing and an appointment as Geographe du Roi d’Anville had the time and funding to work patiently, compiling resources and cross-checking conflicting data. Not infrequently he updated others’ maps to remove information he learned to be incorrect. D’Anville was proud to be a ‘passive’ or armchair geographer, that is, one who remained in Paris rather than travelling to verify sources personally. When he completed a manuscript map, d’Anville commonly submitted it to the workshop of Guillaume Delahaye (1725−1802) for engraving.

The popularity of d’Anville’s maps reflected trust in their accuracy. Within France, d’Anville benefited from a legal monopoly (today, copyright protection) to publish his work, with fines imposed on producers of counterfeits. At the time, however, there was no international restriction − printers in England could copy and alter or ‘remap’ d’Anville’s work and legally sell their output outside France. D’Anville was well aware of these remappings, writing in 1751 to the President of the Royal Society in London that he was flattered to have been copied but regretted he had not been plagiarised in full.

One of several English engravers who remapped d’Anville was Thomas Kitchin (1719−84), who published A General Atlas Describing the Whole Universe ... Being an Improvement of the Maps of D’Anville in 1777. Kitchin claimed his version was an improvement, but in practice for some areas − such as Newfoundland − he removed details found in d’Anville’s original, while for other areas − such as along North America’s eastern seaboard as well as among the islands in the Caribbean − he added more detail. It is tempting to assume that changes made by Kitchin and other contemporary English engravers reflected the incorporation of new information and therefore improvements in accuracy. In some cases, that assumption would be correct − Kitchin’s map, for example, correctly notes that the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island had been ‘destroyed’ since the publication of d’Anville’s original. But close comparison shows that frequently the changes were for overt political, not geographic, reasons.

Indeed, d’Anville’s output coincided with a variety of overseas clashes between the French and British empires, including the War of the Austrian Succession (1740−48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756−63), sometimes referred to as the world’s first global war. Fighting occurred not only in Europe but along coastal Africa as well as in India, both North and South America, and the Caribbean. And when armed forces and cannon-filled ships were not facing each other, the diplomats were. French and English maps were used in competing efforts to justify the locations of poorly demarcated borders, such as the overlapping areas of French Acadia and British Nova Scotia. In the Treaty of Paris (1763), France was forced to choose between gaining back either Canada or the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Perceiving the slavery-derived wealth from sugar cultivation in the Caribbean to be of the most value, it retained these possessions and ‘French Canada’ became British. Martinique and Guadeloupe (as well as the islands of St Pierre and Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland) remain French territories today.

Arguably of most importance to d’Anville and his reputation was his willingness to remove from earlier maps unverified entries − that is, to unmap locations − and so leave substantial areas blank. Such an approach was unusual − more commonly the interior of continents such as Africa and North and South America were filled with unconfirmed Indigenous settlements, rivers and mountains, and sometimes fanciful monsters (‘here be dragons’). D’Anville insisted that geographic features and the existence of towns must be confirmed with contemporary evidence. But, as with the English copies and their alterations, one must look beyond the surface explanation. As historian Petter Hellström observed in 2024, ‘there existed a curious overlap between unmapped spaces and imperial ambitions, and that the rather sudden emergence of blank spaces on European maps of Africa cannot be satisfactorily explained as the by-product of improved scientific standards’.

Studying d’Anville's work shows us how the interpretation of maps has changed over time. Where maps were previously seen as ‘objective’ and stable they are now understood to be socially constructed and contingent. In other words, how maps have been designed, produced and used is subject to choices far beyond that of the original map-maker, whether d’Anville or map publishers of today.

Further Reading

Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754−1766, Knopf, 2000

Martin Brückner, ‘Colonial Counter-Mappings and the Cartographic Reformation in Eighteenth-Century America’, Revue de la Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, 78 (2021)

Matthew H Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and its History, University of Chicago Press, 2019

Petter Hellström, ‘A New New World: Unmapping Africa in the Age of Reason’, Journal for the History of Knowledge, 5 (2024), 57−82

Catherine Hofmann and Lucile Haguet, Une Carrière de Géographe au Siècle des Lumières: Jean-Baptiste d'Anville, Voltaire Foundation, 2018

Jeffers Lennox, ‘Nova Scotia Lost and Found: The Acadian Boundary Negotiation and Imperial Envisioning, 1750−1755’, Acadiensis, XL, no. 2 (Summer/Autumn 2011), 3−31

Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England, University of Chicago Press, 2005