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... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale of the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
--Jorge Luis Borges, "Of Exactitude in Science"
Jorge Luis Borges's monstrous map provides an intriguing image for the process of European empire in the New World. On one level, the story is about the relationship between art and reality, but a more literal reading raises interesting questions about the relationship between maps and reality. Maps are -- or certainly were in the early stages of European exploration -- a form of art themselves, panoramic pictures of the earth drawn from above, a perspective impossible in the preflight era.(1) Maps are more than pictures, however. They represent an attempt not just to depict or define the land but to claim and control it, to impose a human and, most important, political order over it. It is by no means insignificant that Borges's cartographers are agents of some unnamed empire. The connection with the state points to the political power behind the process of mapping. As an extension of imperialist policy, the map covers and threatens to smother both the land and the people on it.
Historians, especially historians of the era of European expansion in North America, might do well to ponder the implications of Borges's imagery and to explore the meaning of maps as instruments of authority. Maps provide two sorts of information, topographical and political. Too often we tend to take that information for granted, assuming it to be a reasonably accurate...