Proposal Changes

One of the biggest challenges I have had with my project is trying to work out the transnational scope. Studying a world map may not originally come across as national history, but looking at who made the map, and the intention of those who commissioned the work tends to focus on the promotion of a country’s agenda. Especially when looking towards colonial maps. So I was planning a more comparative historical project, looking at various colonial maps and to view the links between different empires in how they mapped to promote their own agenda. Originally, I had proposed to explore how the colonial map acted as political propaganda to manipulate the attitudes of society to promote the philosophies of the particular country. But pretty quickly, and with relatively little research, I had come to the conclusion that maps were used as a tool to visually display the extent of empirical conquest and were often distorted to really enhance the agenda of what country’s colonies were shown.

It was slightly unsatisfying to realise that there was no brand new narrative I could take. Thinking that a break away from the project would spark some ideas I turned to read the Week 8 Tutorial reading on Actors and Networks. A sentence from Ulrike Lindner’s Transnational Movements between Colonial Empires,” about how within the context of this particular essay the movement of people between different European colonies would be described as transnational. [680] With this idea in my head, I tackled the Short Essay, focusing on the transnational scope of colonial history, with particular reference to the British Empire. There are so many networks within an empire; there are the obvious trading networks and movement of people but there is also a flow of ideas and ideologies that moves with the people. But what about the networks that expand outwith of the empire? Lindner’s reading showcased how there are often networks between empires themselves.

And so I give you Project Proposal Take II (to be fair, this number is probably a lot higher):

The 1886, Imperial Federation Map has gone on to become the most iconic and most analysed map of the British Empire but when it was released it did not have that much recognition and was overshadowed by the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. This map, however, has gone on to be symbolic for colonial history, and what, from a British perspective, an imperial map can tell us about the world at the time. But if I was to focus on this single year, and look at world, not from the perspective of a map, a lot more networks of connections become apparent. There are a lot of networks that the map cannot display, and the mapmaker may have chosen not to display. I want to highlight the power of the map but also the weaknesses in what was missed out.

Lindner, Ulrike. “Transnational Movements between Colonial Empires: Migrant Workers from the British Cape Colony in the German Diamond Town of Lüderitzbucht.” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne D’histoire 16, no. 5 (2009): 679–95.