This doctoral dissertation award will support an investigation of the place of cartography and science in nineteenth-century industrial development and imperial domination. The research will focus on the British geodetic surveys undertaken by the East India Company as part of its imperial activities in India. The purpose of the project is to find out why politicians and bureaucrats perceived a need for more accurate and more comprehensive maps than were hitherto available, and why they accepted the great expense that such maps entailed. The project will have significance for reshaping our understanding of cartography as not merely an exact and scientific profession concerned with the accurate and truthful depiction of geographic reality, but as an enterprise that is an important part of social and political process.
