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Geographical Research

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September 2006

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44(3):323–335

© 2006 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers

Woodward’s book is certainly worth reading.Perhaps it should have been called ‘MilitaryGeographies of the UK (local and regionalaspects)’. As the very subjective desideratumof a Europeanist, one might add that a chapteron the discursive practices of the ‘special rela-tionship’, on the rhetoric of Tony Blair claimingfor the UK a ‘pivotal role’ or ‘bridging role’between the US and Europe, would have beenuseful in a book on military geographies. Afterall, the ‘pivotal role’ is a case of seeing the land-scape through the lenses of military alliances,and it takes a lot of military geography andimagination to drag the UK away from Europeand into the middle of the Atlantic.

Franz Oswald

Curtin University of TechnologyAustralia

The Commerce of Cartography: Making andMarketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century Franceand England

Mary Sponberg Pedley, University of ChicagoPress, Chicago and London, 2005, xvii + 232pp, ISBN 0 226 65341 2 (hardback) US$40.00.

This is a very specialised work – one for themap library and the collector of historic maps. Itis supremely detailed, explaining the economicsof map-compilation, production and marketingin the ‘long’ eighteenth century, very approxi-mately from 1650 to 1820, the period whenLondon and Paris rose in importance to equaland perhaps eclipse Antwerp and Amsterdam,the former centres of the map trade. The book isbased on a series of lectures by a person whois described as an ‘adjunct assistant curator ofmaps at the William L. Clements Library at theUniversity of Michigan’, and ‘a Latin instructorin the Ann Arbor Public Schools’. It contains amyriad of facts – details of prices and costs, thenames and affiliations of map-makers, sellersand users. Incident and anecdote enliven thestatistical material.

The book is well-structured. A short introduc-tion links the expansion of cartography to theEuropean Enlightenment and the rise of science,details the development of a ‘buoyant’ marketfor maps and globes, and briefly links thehistory of the map trade to the history of carto-graphy itself.

Chapter 1 is headed ‘Getting to Market’. Itoutlines the costs and problems of survey and

compilation of maps. Here are accounts of theproblems faced by French surveyors when thepeople of Brittany threw stones at them, stoletheir equipment, threatened to burn manuscripts,and refused to provide horses or guides, such wastheir ‘fear of taxes and distrust of the taxman’.We also learn that in Scotland in 1740, theReverend Alexander Bryce met opposition whenhe attempted to make observations along theshore of Caithness, as the local people ‘were notanxious that navigation should be made safe,lest it should deprive them of the spoils of thenumerous wrecks along that coast’. The differ-ent backgrounds of surveyors and compilers inFrance and England are compared.

The second chapter is on the costs of mapproduction, with details such as the fact that thehire of mules for the Cassini Survey of Francecost 10 livres per day, and that a small compassfor a 1728 survey of Languedoc cost 20 livres.Legal charges for a British surveyor in NorthAmerica at the end of the eighteenth centuryamounted to £35. 4s. 8d. In England the price ofcopper plates for the engraving of maps variedfrom 3s. 3d to 11s between 1745 and 1748, butthe price of copper rose considerably around thetime of the French Revolution.

Chapter 3 – ‘Getting and Spending’ –describes the pricing and marketing of maps,noting edition sizes and methods of distribu-tion. The roles of the government and crown inthe two countries are compared; Charles IIpromised £500 towards the production of JohnOgilvy’s

Britannia

(but never paid); howeverhe did accord Ogilvy certain tax advantages.Patronage and the sale of maps by subscriptionare discussed. A sad section at the end of thischapter documents ‘The problems of gettingpaid’: it concludes with the pathetic couplet:

As the county of Wicklow I did surveyI must now quit my hold for want of pay.

The next chapter is headed ‘Plagiarism andProtection’. It seems that some things have notchanged in 250 years. The problems faced bythose producing maps from unauthorised copy-ing are documented, and the (incomplete) pro-tection presented by copyright in England andprivilege in France are discussed. The difficul-ties of proving a case at law are mentioned.

‘War is one of history’s prolific generators ofmaps’, states the author early in Chapter 5,which is a case-study describing the surveys andprinted charts of Narragansett Bay, Rhode

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Island. Both British and French maps, and therelationships between them, in the context of theAmerican War of Independence, are describedin detail.

The title of the final chapter is ‘GivingPleasure to the Public: Telling Good from Bad’.Naturally enough the chapter describes theappraisal of maps by the public to whom theywere sold. A very short conclusion summarisessome of the main points raised by the book,emphasising that maps are artefacts that have tobe seen in the context of the economies andsocieties that produced them.

No fewer than five appendices (totallingnearly 40 pages), give, in the form of tables,details of everything connected with costs andprices in the map trade over the period inquestion in both France and England; these arefollowed by over 80 pages of endnotes andreferences, and a useful index.

The book is well illustrated, both with mapextracts and pictures of the various stages in themaking of maps. Some of the illustrations insertedwith the letterpress are rather dark and obscure,but a set of eight colour plates, printed on aglossy paper insert, show the beauty of some ofthe maps mentioned. The standard of productionis excellent: there is a handsome green clothbinding with gold lettering; the standard ofprinting and the paper quality are superb. Thereare a few singularities: the running titles foreach chapter are given along the bottom of thepage, not the top, and all sub-headings are givenin brackets: these trifles may annoy some.

We learn an enormous amount about thepersonages who were responsible for producingmaps in the eighteenth century. We are told aboutpatrons, prices, problems, partnerships and pay-ments. There are little nuggets of interest suchas the fact that Madame de Pompadour, mistressof Louis XV, was a keen collector of maps andglobes. But although the academic background(or lack of it) of some map-makers is men-tioned, and the connections between map-making and wars and politics emerge from timeto time, the essential ‘Why’ is sometimes miss-ing or briefly covered.

This reviewer would have liked a tighterconnection between mapping and intellectuallife to have been drawn in this important periodin scientific development and exploration.

Patrick Armstrong

University of Western AustraliaAustralia

South Australian Geographical Journal (SAGJ)Special issue: The Centenary of AcademicGeography in South Australia

Nick Harvey and Fay Gale (eds), 2004, Volume102, ISSN 1030 0481.

The centenary in 2004 of the teaching ofGeography at tertiary level in South Australiawas marked by the publication of a special issueof the journal of the Royal Geographical Societyof South Australia. The publication containsnine articles contributed by current and pastacademic staff of the three South Australianuniversities, some of whom have also held rolesin secondary education institutes. The contribu-tions are ordered to give the reader an idea ofthe chronology of the events within mainly theUniversity of Adelaide, but also the other twotertiary institutions in South Australia: FlindersUniversity and the University of South Australia.The importance of the teaching of Geography atall levels of higher education is acknowledgedby additional articles describing the growth anddevelopment of the Royal Geographical Society(South Australia) itself, and the continuing roleGeography plays in secondary schools.

In reviewing the contributions of the authorsit becomes clear that there are very real tensionsregarding what Geography is and where it fits inthe current academic framework. In this contextit is useful to return to John Holmes’ (2002)article in this journal in which he considered thecross disciplinary links made by Geographydepartments between 1978 and 2000. He clearlyestablished that Geography has evolved manycross-disciplinary links within the tertiary systemand this theme is repeated in the papers withinthe SAGJ Special issue. The theme of Geogra-phy as a stand alone topic or discipline is wellcovered by Fay Gale in her article which out-lines the development of university Geographyin South Australia from 1904 to 1960. The com-plexity of its initial teaching and aims, linked asit was to the commercial development of the Stateof South Australia, and taught not as a part ofa Geography major but within Commercial orBusiness Certificates, is somewhat reminiscentof the comments made by Holmes (2002) asGeography repositioned itself in later times.

Fay Gale provides interesting vignettes writtenby relatives of the early pioneers of Geographyand Adelaide University which give a morepersonal insight into the people who have lefttheir mark on current teaching in many ways.These reflections add colour to what could