Maps are all around us. Maps not only inundate our reality, impel our direction, depict weather forecasts, provide demographic data, and distinguish electoral districts, but they also mark property boundaries, affirm state lines, represent territorial limits, provoke geopolitical crises, and sustain sovereign claims. These are all more or less well-known cartographic functions and have merited scrutiny, in varying degrees, from various disciplines. But the historically constituted intrinsic ties that bind maps and law, cartography and jurisdiction, the visual and the legal, are yet to receive sustained attention in legal scholarship.
My recent article in the Law and History Review, ‘The Cartojuridism of the British East India Company’, paid attention to this overlooked set of relationships between cartography and law, in a specific historical context. By assembling and examining a number of maps, memorandums, memoirs, regulations, and literature on cartography, history, legal theory, and cultural theory, the article made three, interconnected, arguments. First, that maps are not just capable of being innocuous representations of a pre-existing geographic reality out there, but they can also be (and have historically been) used as visual tools to anticipate and create jurisdiction, sovereign claims, and legal authority. Second, that maps can also be used to sustain, and at times constitute, forms of social division, hierarchy, and classifications. Third, I proposed a notion of cartojuridism, as a historically grounded theoretical concept (forgive my tautology, for all concepts are historically grounded), to capture the myriad ways in which maps and law interact and relate with each other.
On the first claim, I examined the early cartographic projects of Major James Rennell – the first Surveyor General of the British East India Company – including his Bengal Atlas (1780) and the Map of Hindoostan (1781) to demonstrate how cartography anticipated the transposition of sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent, created juridical offices, and even entrenched precise territorial limits between provinces and districts. For instance, through a detailed examination of Plates IX and XI of the Bengal Atlas, I showed how the ornamental features appearing on the Atlas – including a vivid depiction of the Battle of Plassey (1757) and elaborate dedications to various Company officers – made claims of the land as actually being under the sovereign possession of the British Crown. At the time of the Atlas’s creation, Bengal was not yet under the sovereignty of the Company, much less the Crown. For all that the Company was legally entitled to, as per the Allahabad Treaty signed soon after the Battle of Buxar (1765), was only the diwani rights to collect revenues in the province of Bengal. What the maps portrayed, however, were a visual lineage of a continued and uninterrupted possession of the land, and explicitly made claims for the territory as being held under the ‘full sovereignty’ of the British Nation (implying the Crown).
Created at a time when there was a heated debate in London on whether it was the Company or the Crown that was the lawful possessor of the land, which provoked both The Regulating Act of 1773 as well as the Government of India Act of 1784, the maps implicated themselves in the ongoing deliberations not only by making unequivocal claims of Crown sovereignty but also by anticipating legal realities and affinities that were yet to come. The Map of Hindoostan (1782) further alluded to the authority of the British Legislature over the whole of India, at a time when that kind of a direct intervention was not yet legally permissible. In this way, through an ingenious mixture of cartographic and aesthetic features, the early maps of the British East India Company made legal claims, and anticipated lawful relations, of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and even the creation of particular offices and roles, well before they actually arrived in the subcontinent.
On the second claim, I examined early maps of Madras and Calcutta to show how maps sustained and entrenched racial divisions based on colour and ethnicity. For instance, the Plan of Madras (1726) has been considered by some historians to be the first map anywhere in the world to depict a racial division within a city. For it was this map that showed the division of Madras into Whyte Town and Black Town. What has not been perceived widely is that before this map was published, there was only one other isolated instance where this coloured segregation appeared on an official document. After the publication of this map, this distinction became nearly uniform in all official documents and the white—black division became entrenched in government records. In Calcutta, maps were again used to depict segregation, separation, and separate habitations of the colonial masters and the native servants and workers. In this way, maps were used to firmly entrench and redouble, if not visually constitute, social stratification and hierarchy.
Through an elaborate examination and assessment of these features, I arrived at the third claim, of a notion of cartojuridism. In essence, I just used a neologism for a bundle of features that have long been recognised by historians of cartography and, more recently, by a few critical legal thinkers and legal historians. That maps have been variously used to anticipate sovereign claims, proclaim jurisdiction, entrench legal authority, create territory, and constitute and sustain social classifications and hierarchies, have been engaged with in cartographic history, at least since the 1990s, but have remained, in the main, overlooked in legal scholarship. In proposing cartojuridism, my aim was to contribute to this growing literature from a legal context (which is yet to sufficiently develop) and especially from an Indian context (given that cartography and its historical ties with sovereignty, society and the law has been entirely ignored in Indian legal scholarship). Whereas scholars in Australia, especially Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, have thought about maps as a legal ‘technology of representation’, my work shows that maps can be not only representative but constitutive of reality as well, engaging both in mimesis as well in genesis.
Keywords: Maps; British East India Company; Colonial History; Race; Cartojuridism
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Sabarish Suresh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the NUS Faculty of Law.
Email: s.suresh@nus.edu.sg