During the late nineteenth century, the U.S. federal government initiated a vigorous national mapping program, mobilized by scientists in the U.S. Geological Survey, that was designed to produce accurate topographical and geological maps at a large scale for every piece of national territory and, in turn, to make the maps and related information available to the public by purchase and through library depositories distributed throughout the country. The national map project, which was initially controversial, reflected an emerging set of relations between science and the governance of resources and environments, and in particular an active role for government scientists in the construction of national territory, territoriality, and identity at a crucial moment of US global expansion. This research examines the scientific and cartographic nature of American territoriality in an era, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized by the emergence of new global flows and exchanges that transcended, but were profoundly regulated and structured by, national boundaries. While extending commercial and military activities and building influence beyond its borders, the US at the same time depended on flows of people, resources, and ideas from the outside for economic growth and prosperity within, making the construction of new modes of territoriality, i.e., the inclusionary and exclusionary practices meant to influence the nature and content of an area, a practical necessity. With a basis in international archival research, the project examines the role of science and scientific modes of representation in the making of territory and modes of territoriality, focusing on the work of US government scientists in both the U.S. and the Philippine Islands. The Philippines was a pivotal site for America's heightened global engagement in which science played a central role in matters of colonial governance as diverse as public health, agriculture and land use, and ethnology and tribal relations. The research thus seeks to improve our understanding of the changing dimensions of U.S. territoriality in a global context over relatively long historical periods, focusing on the interrelations of science and institutions of governance in effecting these transformations.
The meaning of national territory in a global age remains a vital question for understanding the contemporary world; it was also vital to problems of governance one hundred years ago when, in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. expanded its jurisdictions into the Caribbean and Pacific as part of a wider global engagement. This project contributes new theoretical and empirical knowledge concerning the interrelations of science, government, and territorial and resource control from a formative, but too little known, moment in US and global history to inform contemporary scholarship, education, and public debate. The project will also facilitate new connections between American and Filipino scholars of the American colonial period.
