New Nature of Maps

J. B. Harley lectured in historical geography at the Universities of Liverpool and Exeter before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His ideas on the meaning of maps have influenced not just geographers and map historians but also students of art history and literature. At Milwaukee he began, with David Woodward, the multivolume History of Cartography, the first volume of which was published in 1987. Paul Laxton lectured in the Department of Geography at the University of Liverpool for more than thirty years. He is now an independent scholar. J. H. Andrews is a retired professor of geography at Trinity College, Dublin and author of A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Shapes of Ireland.

The father of critical cartography, and therefore the idea that a map should be understood as more than just a set of directions, was J. B. Harley... The New Nature of Maps... display[s] great erudition. -- Nicholas Lemann New Yorker Harley was an iconoclast, subverting traditional approaches to map-making by drawing together art history, literature, philosophy and visual culture. It's a view that can now be savored in his collected essays, The New Nature of Maps. -- Nick Saunders New Scientist With supreme tact, sympathetic insight into Harley's personality and his own deft scholarship, Laxton has produced... a book worthy of Harley. -- Catherine Delano-Smith Nature Inlcuding Andrew's introduction... we have a debate within the volume, not only postmodernism and its critique, but also other examples of Harley's anit-positivist and anti-Eurocentric approach alongside a potent understanding of the processes and problems of map making. -- Jeremy Black Imago Mundi The 'new nature' of maps reflects the sea change in the discipline of the history of cartography that has occurred, to a remarkable degree instigated by Brian Harley. -- John Cloud Technology and Culture 2003

• Contents: Introduction: Meaning, Knowledge, and Power in the Map Philosophy of J.B. Harley, by J. H. Andrews 1 Text and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps 2 Maps, Knowledge, and Power 3 Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe 4 Power and Legitimation in the English Geographical Atlases of the Eighteenth Century 5 Deconstructing the Map New England Cartography and the Native Americans 7 Can There Be a Cartographic Ethics