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Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping
the Construction of Knowledge Spaces

DAVID TURNBULL

ABSTRACT:Science and cartography have had an intimate history which has not been simply the creation of
ever more accurate scientific maps but one in which science, cartography and the state have co-produced the
knowledge space that provides the conditions for the possibility of modem science and cartography. The
central cartographic process is the assemblage of local knowledges and, as such, is a particular form of the
assembly processes fundamental to science. The first attempts by the state to create a space within which to
assemble cartographic knowledge were at the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratacion, and hence they
can be described as the first scientific institutions in Europe. Their failure to create a knowledge space can be
attributed to the nature of the portolan charts. The triangulation of France and the linking of the Greenwich
and Paris Observatories established the kind of knowledge space that now constitutes the dominant form
within which modem science and cartography are produced. However, resistance to the hegemony of
modem scientific knowledge space remains possible through finding alternative ways of assembling local
knowledge.

KEYWORDS:Local knowledge; knowledge spaces; sociology of scientific knowledge; Padron Real; Cassini and
the mapping of France; Ordnance Survey.

Mapsare a primevehide for repositioning,refraining, Structureof ScientificRevolutions,scientific knowledge

rethinkingsciencebecausetheoriesare maps,mapsare
was held to be objective, universal and true and
science instantiated,without maps science would not
have been possible. The art of making pictorial hence immune to sociological analysis, which was
statements in a precise and repeatableform is one restricted to the institutions and social organisation
that we have long taken for grantedin the west. But it of science.3 The subsequent sociological approaches
is usuallyforgottenthat without printsand blueprints, to science by Barnes, Bloor and others in Britain
without maps and geometry, the world of modem
sciencewould hardlyexist.' and Europe treated objectivity, truth and univer-
sality as effects to be explained rather than as the
The intimate connection of the history of science
consequences of logic or the scientific method. The
with the history of cartography has long been taken
sociology of science was thus expanded to include
for granted.2 Just as significantly, its converse has
the form and content of science, in addition to its
also been taken for granted, that the history of
rate and direction of growth, resulting in the large
cartography has essentially been the history of
body of literature and research which has come to
scientific development. However, both science and
be known as the sociology of scientific knowledge
cartography have been subject to considerable re-
or SSK.4
examination in the light of the critiques of
positivism during the thirty years since McLuhan's
comment, but little has been done to bring these The Local and Spatial Nature of Scientific
critical approaches together to 'reframe' the
Knowledge
science-cartography relationship. A major thrust of SSK has been to focus on what
Prior to the publication of Thomas Kuhn's scientists actually do, which has meant that much 5
 of the research has been a detailed examination of
the daily practices of scientists in their laboratories.
One of the findings common to the wide variety of
approaches that fall under the SSK umbrella is that
scientific knowledge is local in origin.5 The picture
of science that has emerged from empirical inves-
tigations of both contemporary and historical
scientists is that all knowledge is constructed at
specific sites through the engagements of particular
scientists with particular skills, materials, tools,
theories and techniques. Such processes of knowl-
edge production are revealed as thoroughly social
and contingent, requiring judgements and negotia-
tions by groups of scientists in specific contexts.
Thus a fundamental characteristic of scientific
knowledge is its localness.
This localist thesis can be expressed in a variety
of ways. In general the production, transmission
and acceptance of scientific knowledge are not the
consequence of the application of some set of
universal standards or procedures but the outcome
of an open-ended process of socially negotiated
judgements by practitioners who are struggling to
make their own views and skills credible and
authoritative.6 Emphasising the local in this way,
then, raises the question of how scientific knowl-
edge becomes universal. How and why does it
move from the various sites of production and
become accumulated at a centre?
Movement of scientific knowledge from the local
site and moment of its production and application
to other places and times requires both the social
strategies and the technical devices to create
assemblages from otherwise heterogeneous and
isolated knowledges. The effect of such social
strategies and technical devices is to make local
knowledges both mobile and assemblable and
primarily involves creating equivalences and con-
nections among the motley of practices, instrumen-
tation, theories and people.7 The work involved in
the creation of such assemblages has been aptly
described by John Law as 'heterogeneous engineer-
ing.8
By definition, the localist thesis is spatial.
Knowledge is not simply local, it is located, it is
situated, it has a place. An assemblage is also spatial
in that it is made up of linked sites, people and
activities. Thus the assemblage of scientific knowl-
edge creates a knowledge space. Such spaces have a
variety of structural components: psychological,
cultural, physical, social, legal and moral. They are
6 simultaneously conceptual and lived spaces.9 The
approach taken here is cartographical, both because
historically maps have played a central role in the
construction of scientific knowledge spaces and
because differing ways of mapping can be counter-
poised so as to enable an exploration of the
structure of these spaces.
The Power of Maps
Until recently, cartography and science have
been portrayed as having a closely interwoven
history. The most common metaphor for scientific
knowledge or theories was the map, and the
strongest thema running through the history of
cartography was of maps becoming increasingly
scientific and ever more accurate mirrors of nature.
The development of 'scientific maps' was taken to
be identical with a progressive, cumulative, objec-
tive and accurate representation of geographical
reality and, hence, was also assumed to be
synonymous with the growth of science itself.'0
This view continues to dominate and reflects an
increased synergy between science and mapping
that has arisen with the expanding spatialisation of
knowledge and meaning. Virtually every domain in
science is now found to have a spatial dimension
through the process of mapping. In the social
sciences, spatial explanations are complementing
the historical; in the cultural and literary arenas,
cartographic and spatial tropes abound. The spatial-
isation of knowledge is one of the defining
characters of this phase of modernism which
some would label postmodern."
However, as we have come to expect in the
postmodern era, just when the positivist dream of
hegemony seems about to reach fulfilment, contra-
dictions and counter currents have emerged, in this
case in the form of some powerful re-evaluations of
the progressive character of the cartographic
enterprise. 12 In particular, Brian Harley has tren-
chantly criticised the realist illusion that maps
simply reflect reality with ever increasing accuracy,
arguing that 'cartography is primarily a form of
political discourse concerned with the acquisition
and maintenance of power.,'3
Compilation,generalisation,classification,formation
into hierarchies,and standardisationof geographical
data, far from being mere 'neutral'technicalactivities,
involve power-knowledge relations at work. Just as
the disciplinaryinstitutions describedby Foucault-
prisons,schools, armies,factories-serve to normalise
human beings,so too the workshopof the map-maker
can be seen as normalisingthe phenomena of place
and territoryin creatinga sketchof a made worldthat
society desired.'4
 Harley has done much to counter the orthodox
view of maps as neutral, mimetic devices. His
analyses are primarily semiotic, providing for the
possibility of understanding the power effects of
maps and for alternative readings of map texts.
However, Harley offers little scope for analysing the
ways in which maps structure the knowledge
spaces we live in, or for resisting the apparent
domination of the scientific map makers, since he
does not consider the wider contexts of power
within which the interactions between science and
cartography take place and the reasons why
cartography acquired its particular forms. The
possibility of the knowledge/power relationship
being 'other than it is' may be more readily
revealed by considering the social processes of
map making and alternative ways of spatially
assembling knowledge. ' 5
Modern systematic maps rely on a standardised
form of knowledge which establishes a prescribed
set of possibilities for knowing, seeing and acting.
They create a knowledge space within which
certain kinds of understandings and of knowing
subjects, material objects and their relations in
space and time are authorised and legitimated.'6
Science and cartography co-produce each other in a
common knowledge space. Maps, however, are not
restricted to one register: they can occur in a variety
of modes, archives and spatial discourses which
may be discrete or overlap.'7 Historically and
culturally, maps have been made in a variety of
modes, and within contemporary Western society
they range from sketch maps through Ordnance
Survey maps to maps of the structure of the
universe.18
Maps of whatever register are doubly spatial in
that they create social spaces while at the same time
they are modes of spatial representation. They
create these two aspects of spaciality through
enabling two corresponding modes of connectivity.
Maps connect heterogeneous and disparate entities,
events, locations and phenomena, enabling us to
see patterns that are not otherwise visible. They
also connect the territory with the social order.'9 In
so linking social order with an apparently natural
20
order, maps 'naturalise the arbitrary'.
Social and representational orderings of space
are 'maps of meaning' through which groups and
individuals make sense of their social world.
Although such cultural maps are in some measure
hegemonic, sources and sites of resistance are
always found within any map.
Likeany cartographicimage, 'mapsof meaning'codify
knowledge and represent it symbolically.But, like
other maps, they are ideologicalinstrumentsin the
sense that they project a preferred reading of the
material world, with prevailingsocial relations mir-
rored in the depictionof physicalspace. Some mean-
ings are dominant;others result from struggleagainst
the dominant order. As with every map, however, a
certain ambiguityalways remains. Culturalmaps are
capableof multiplereadings.But, . . . dominantread-
ings never go completely unchallenged;resistanceis
alwayspossible.2'
Equally, maps can be resisted or challenged by
other modes within a culture or by modes from
other cultures.22 By recognising the opportunities
for resistance in our daily practices and in differ-
ences in ways of knowing and being in other
cultures, we may be able to 'reposition' science. The
questions thus become, how did the daily practices
we now take for granted come into being, and what
is the structure of the knowledge space we inhabit?
To answer these we need to study the first attempt
to create a national knowledge space.
The Casa de la Contratacion
At the beginning of the sixteenth century,
Portugal and Spain were the first nations to attempt
to construct spaces within which to accumulate and
regulate all geographical knowledge. They set up
bureaucracies in Lisbon and Seville to supervise
their rapidly burgeoning empires in the East Indies
and the Americas. Called respectively the Casa da
Mina (Lisbon) and the Casa de la Contratacion
(Seville), these bureaucracies were essentially
Boards of Trade whose primary task was to regulate
imports from the New World and the East Indies so
that the state could maintain a trade monopoly and
impose taxes. Within these Boards of Trade were
established the first hydrographic offices, and in
those offices were held the first 'maps of empire',
the Padreo Real and the Padron Real, variously
translated as template or pattern maps, standard
maps, master charts and official patterns.23 Both
these maps were intended to serve at least two
purposes: to keep knowledge of new discoveries
within the control of the state and to ensure the
standardisation of that knowledge, so that errors
and inconsistencies among charts could be elimi-
nated and they could be revised and updated as
new discoveries were made.24
The two Casas were Europe's first scientific
institutions.25 They were the first centres where a
systematic attempt was made to bring together the
diverse fragments of knowledge about the newly 7
 I~~~~~~~~~~I

~~~~~14 ~~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~>
8~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
discovered world. This was not a simple matter of
collating information; it required a complex degree
of heterogeneous engineering to create an assem-
blage of practices, instrumentation, documents,
theories and people.26 The Casas brought together
a range of experts (cosmographers, astronomers,
navigators and pilots, ship's masters, instrument
makers and cartographers) and a variety of instru-
ments, navigational techniques, tables and methods
of calculation, as well as the diverse observations
and practical experiences of all kinds of mariners.
To achieve an assemblage of this kind it was
necessary to create the equivalence and connec-
tions whereby the separate local knowledges could
be combined in the form of licensed charts,
standardised tables and instruments, and certified
practitioners.27
The Casas and the Padrons thus represent the
first example of the kind of knowledge space that
we now take for granted as a precondition for the
production of scientific and technical knowledge.
However, neither Portugal nor Spain succeeded in
sustaining state control of geographical knowledge,
and by the 1560s their template maps had started to
fall into desuetude.28 An examination of why this
came about throws some light on the ways in
which such knowledge spaces are assembled.
Unfortunately the Portuguese archives were lost
in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, though the
anonymous map, known as the Cantino Plani-
sphere after the man who smuggled it out of
Portugal, is probably a copy of the Padreo Real and
is the oldest extant map to show the Tordesillas
Line and the New World and the East Indian
discoveries (Fig. 1).29 So the Spanish Padron Real
alone is considered here, though it is reasonable to
assume that the two attempts at creating knowl-
edge spaces were similar.30
The Spanish template map, the Padron Real, was
a portolan chart. Such a chart has no projection and
no grid of latitude and longitude and lacks a
common scale or unit of measure (Fig. 2)31
Although portolan charts embodied a corpus of
traditional knowledge and skills, they were by no
means static or closed. They show a clear topony-
mic development from the thirteenth century until
the middle of the sixteenth century, when they
started to decline.32 They endured despite being
largely hand-drawn copies that, it might be
anticipated, would have shown a history of
accumulated error, distortion and degradation.
Here then was a knowledge system which, though
essentially graphic and spatial, did not rely on any
of the supposed prerequisites of scientific cartogra-
phy. It therefore provides a counter example to the
commonly held view that traditional and non-
quantitative knowledge systems are inherently
static and closed.33
The kinds of knowledge space that the portolan
charts made possible and operated within were
quite different from the knowledge space that came
about with the re-introduction to western Europe
of Ptolemy's grid and later with Mercator's projec-
tion (1569). Portolan charts were not based on the
techniques of coordinate geometry, perspective,
calculation and the notion-central to our notions
of science and rational action-of a mathematically
and logically consistent plan or set of rules. Instead,
portolan charts were based in a different set of
techniques for assembling local knowledge. Their
heterogeneous components were not assembled by
rendering them equivalent through quantification,
measurement and calculation. The diverse compo-
nents were preserved in analogue rather than
digital form and were assembled through the
attribution of directionality.34
Several historians of cartography have shown
that portolan charts have considerable regional
variation, indicating that they are based on surveys
of independent origin. This heterogeneity is further
suggested by the variety of scales and units of
measure. One chart-for example, the Beccari
chart of 1403-might have several different scales
and sets of latitude lines.35 David Woodward has
argued that the early portolan charts may have
resulted from putting together the closed traverses
of eight separate basins or seas of the Mediterra-
nean.36 Portolan charts are thus most likely to be a
mosaic of elements loosely assembled from separate
but related navigational traditions.
The most obvious feature of portolan charts is
the network of rhumb lines which gives them the
deceptive appearance of having a fixed, mathema-
tically determined grid. In fact, the rhumbs are lines
joining the named points of direction generated by
drawing one or two large circles so placed so as to
cover most of the chart, each circle being sub-
divided into sixteen or thirty-two equidistant points
(Fig. 3). The ad hoc way in which these assem-
blages of geographical information were achieved is
emphasised by the fact that the rhumb lines on
different charts do not coincide, each chart having
its own starting point.
The means of locating a port or coastal feature 9
 -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-

Fig. 2. Detail from 'Carte Pisane', c.1290), the oldest known Western sea chart. Vellum, 50 x 105 cm. Note absence of
projection, grid and scale. (Courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Cartes et Plans; Res. G6. B 118.)

on a portolan chart was not by reference to a
mathematical grid but to distance and direction, the
latter originally conceived as wind direction. Later,
each wind direction was translated into a compass
direction through subdivision of the horizon circle
into thirty-two colour-coded but unnumbered
points. In short, it was directionality-the attribu-
tion of direction to the observational and experi-
ential phenomena in analogue rather than digital
form-which allowed the process of assemblage of
the heterogeneous elements on the portolan charts.
Portolan charts were essentially 'catalogue[5] of
directions to follow between notable points' and
mnemonics for recalling lists of ports.37 This way of
ordering knowledge spatially is common to all early
seafaring traditions and enabled navigators as
10 disparate such as Pacific islanders and North Sea
medieval sailors to have a dynamic cognitive map
in their heads (Fig.4).38
The Portuguese and Spanish maritime explora-
tions were thus based in a nautical tradition that
enabled ships' masters to navigate using their own
experience and charts from a variety of non-official
sources. In bringing all that knowledge together in
one place, the governments were attempting to
construct a 'general system of metrication'.39 The
state augmented this tradition by encouraging the
development of instruments (including an
improved compass and astrolabe), new tables for
calculating distances and for giving latitudes and
the sun's declination, new techniques like latitude
sailing, and new forms of social organisation to
assemble and standardise the information under
one roof.
The Casa de la Contratacion de las Indias was
 A,

Fig. 3. This Martelbio,or 'sea backcloth', by Petrus Vesconte (end of 13th century), shows how the sixteen nodal points
dividing a hidden circle provide the framework of rhumb lines on which the geographical details of portolan charts were
recorded. (Courtesy Bibliotheque municipale de Lyon; MS 175, f.2'.)

founded by royal decree in January 1503. On 8
August 1508 a separate geographical or cosmogra-
phical department was created within which, by the
king's order, a master chart of the new territories,
the Padron Real, was to be compiled under the
supervision of a commission of pilots headed by
Amerigo Vespucci, the Pilot Major.
We commandthat a PadronGeneralbe made and, so
that it should be more accurate,we command our
officials of the Casa de la Contratacionthat they
assembleall our pilots,the most skilledcaptainsat the
time, and that the said Amerigo Vespucci,our pilot
major being present, a padron of all the lands and
islandsof the Indieshitherto discoveredand belonging
to our kingdomsand seignoriesbe drawnup and made
... when they find new lands or islandsor shoals or
new harboursor anythingthat should be recordedin
the said padronreal on their returnto Castilethey go
to reportto you the said pilot majorof the Casade la
Contratacionso that all shallbe registeredin the proper
place in the padron real, in order that navigatorsbe
betteradvisedand cautious.40
However, it was not by itself enough to
accumulate and standardise knowledge. To keep
all the components of an assemblage or network-
people, instruments and data-stable requires con-
stant effort.4' In order to stop their maps unravel-
ling, the Casa had to set the boundaries of the
knowledge space and to police the inputs and
outputs as they moved across the boundaries. They
had to establish what groups could contribute new
knowledge, how that knowledge was to be
expressed and evaluated, how it should be stored 1
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Fig. 4. A Micronesian star compass. The direction of the rising points of each star is associated with a named place or an
'aimer', a living sea mark. The breadfruit picker on the right is used to pull, in the imagination, the named direction towards
the operator in the 'Island Looking' exercise, while learning the names of directions. (Micronesian Island 'Looking Exercise',
from W. Goodenough and S. D. Thomas, 'Traditional navigation in the western Pacific: a search for pattern', Expedition,29: 3
(1987), Fig. 5). (Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia.)

and reproduced, how disputes over conflicting
evidence should be settled, and what techniques
were appropriate for adjudicating ownership and
control. What was to count as knowledge was as
much a political and moral problem as an episte-
mological one, but it was also a problem that
required the implementation of social, literary and
technical practices of representation.42
For instance, the problem of accumulating uni-
form data and representing them on a standard
chart was not just a technical matter. Lacking an
accurate method of time telling, navigators found it
difficult to determine longitude. With no projection,
no grid and no clear agreement on the length of a
degree, some argued for 16' leagues and others for
171. Nor could Pedro Nufies, the Portuguese
mathematician and navigator, settle the matter,
and he opted to produce a set of tables for each
value.
One of the principal roles of the Pilot Mayor at
the Casa de la Contratacion was to ensure that
ships' captains were trained and certified as
competent in a uniform set of techniques and that
the new compasses and astrolabes were constructed
12 according to a common set of principles. Differences
among charts became more pronounced as they
proliferated, and the attempt to maintain a mono-
poly of chart production broke down. In 1527
Charles V ordered the first cosmographer at the
Casa, the Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro, to
create a new master chart, the Padron General, in
order to eliminate the disagreement and error (Fig.
5). At the same time, the king relinquished total
state control of chart production and commanded
that anyone be allowed to produce charts provided
each met with the Casa's approval.43
The social, moral and political nature of estab-
lishing the process of standardisation and stabilisa-
tion is reflected in a series of disputes. One dispute
began in 1493 over the position of the Spice Islands
with respect to the line that the Pope had drawn to
divide the new-found world into Spanish and
Portuguese spheres. In 1494, following Portuguese
complaints, the Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line
270 leagues to the west. While an empirical
resolution remained technically impossible, the
economic and political pressures of Portugal's
increasing ascendancy over Spain resulted in
another treaty settlement at Saragossa in 1529
Fig. 5. Part of Diogo Ribeiro's planisphere (1529). Ribeiro, Cosmographer Royal, and the Pilot Mayor who succeeded
Sebastian Cabot in 1518, derived his Planisphere from the Padron Real. The chart shows the known world after Magellan's
voyage, with the Tordesillas Line as it was originally drawn 'M1494. The Moluccas are shown on the Spanish side, though
Spain-was about to hand them over to Portugal after the line was redrawn 'Mthe Treaty of Saragossa, 1529. Vellum, 85 x
204 cm. (Courtesy Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; Borgiano 111.)

which put the Spice Islands on the Portuguese side
of the line.
Another dispute reveals the basic difficulty of
establishing 'the facts of the matter' in the correc-
tion of the Padron General: who was the proper
authority and what was the proper technique for
determining which piece of information was correct
in a case of disagreement? In 1543, the Pilot Mayor
Sebastian Cabot and the cosmographer Alonso de
Chaves went to court over corrections to the
Padron."1The manufacture and sale of instruments
and charts were largely a monopoly in the hands of
Diego Gutierrez, a favourite of Cabot's. Pedro
Medina, Chaves's ally, complained that he was
not given access to the Padron and that Gutierrez's
instruments were faulty. 45 Chaves also complained
that the Padron was not kept up to date because
pilots did not know how to collect data to give to
the cosmographers. Other noted pilots agreed the
Padron was useless.
However, it was not clear where the appropriate
authority to deal with these disputed claims lay.
The visitor appointed by the Casa to hear the case
was a good committee man who believed in
consensus and argued that truth would be estab-
lished by everyone agreeing to sign the Padron.
Gutierrez revealed that the form of his charts was
determined by the demands of his customers. Cabot
claimed that he did what was required by law.
Others appealed variously to the authority of the
crown and God. A visiting Portuguese cartographer
Francisco Falero took the modem but as yet
unestablished empirical position and called for
observation, description and experiment, while
also pointing out the inherent flaws in the portolan
chart's projectionless mode of representation. 13
 In 1563 the Casa was still concerned about errors
in the Padron, and in one of the earliest examples
of sociological investigation, the pilots were given a
questionnaire asking their opinion about how to
correct the master map. The majority of respon-
dents agreed that the charts were in error but,
perhaps reflecting their adherence to the tradition
of the portolan charts, they thought that the best
solution was not to change the chart but to let
individual pilots carry on using whatever tech-
niques they found best. Those who liked compasses
should carry several, those who liked astrolabes
could try bigger ones.46 Ultimately the knowledge
space that the Spanish tried to construct proved too
hard to sustain. The navigational tradition of the
portolan charts was immune to the state's
demands, being in effect too local and too auton-
omous.
The Padron General slipped into disuse in the
1560s. Many of the difficulties it revealed in the
attempt to create a knowledge space capable of
embracing the world are said to have been resolved
by the technical solution provided by Mercator in
1569. Mercator's projection provided a grid and
represented loxodromes (courses of a constant
bearing) as straight lines, which was a distinct
advantage. The representation of loxodromes had
previously been difficult, since, as Pedro Nufies had
pointed out, loxodromes on plane charts, as on
portolan charts, though drawn as straight lines
were in fact curves. The combination of perspective
geometry with a grid of latitude and longitude
created the possibility of accurately locating any
spot on the earth's surface. It was this calculative
framework, or space within which to assemble
knowledge, that, according to some historians of
the Renaissance and the scientific revolution,
provided the essential condition for the possibility
of modem science.47 Such a framework had, of
course, been initially proposed by Ptolemy in his
Geography, which reached Europe by way of
Byzantium in the thirteenth century though it did
not achieve wide circulation until its translation
into Latin in the fifteenth century.
However, while Mercator's projection had the
potential to contain the world and bring it to the
desk top, considerable social and technical difficul-
ties had to be resolved before a knowledge space of
this kind could be fully established. As late as 1753
when Tobias Mayer published his state of the art
'Mappa Critica' of Germany in which the location
14 of 200 places was portrayed, 'only 33 were fixed by
astronomical determinations of latitude', and none
was apparently well fixed by longitude.48 Mayer's
map shows that accurate location was hard to
achieve but cartographers were not completely
dependent on fixed mathematically determined
spatial structures to assemble knowledge.
The First National Survey
Cartography and science did not become fully
integrated until Jean Dominique Cassini was
appointed to establish the Royal Observatory in
Paris in the last half of the seventeenth century. The
Academie Royale was set up in 1666 for the explicit
purpose of correcting and improving maps and
sailing charts in the light of the recognition that the
solution to the major problems in geography,
chronology, and navigation lay in astronomy and
geodesy. In 1667 work was begun on the Royal
Observatory at Faubourg St. Jacques. The Acade-
mie also sent out expeditions of trained personnel
to measure the latitude and longitude of places such
as Guadeloupe, since Cassini's work on predicting
the eclipse times of Jupiter's satellites had made it
possible to determine longitude on land.49
As head of the leading observatory, Cassini was
in correspondence with astronomers all over
Europe. New data began to pour in so fast that he
had to devise a new way to assemble it. This was to
be his famous Planisphere Terrestre, a 24-foot circle
drawn on the floor of the third level of the west
tower, which had been oriented by compass and
quadrant when the foundations of the observatory
were laid. The circle formed the outline for an
azimuthal projection with the north pole at the
centre, from which meridians radiated at ten degree
intervals. The prime meridian was drawn from the
centre to pass through the midpoint between the
two south windows of the octagonal tower, and the
parallels of latitude formed concentric circles. The
Academie's interest focused on the precise location
of places that could be used for future surveys, that
is, towns, no matter how insignificant, with
astronomical observatories.50
The floor map was considered a major achieve-
ment and attracted a great deal of attention. James
II and Louis XIV both came to see it. But its location
subjected it to a good deal of wear, and though it
was restored in 1690, by the turn of the century it
had become effaced.5' Although large globes drew
big crowds at international exhibitions into the
nineteenth century, and the Lamonosov globe in St
Petersburg was large enough for twelve people to
Fig. 6. The 'Planisphere Terrestre' (1696) is Jacques Cassini's printed version of the map his father Jean Dominique Cassini
had laid out on the floor of the Paris Observatory. Some forty-odd astronomical stations from which the data were
assembled are marked by stars. 555 mm. diameter. (Courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale; G6. DD. 2987 and G6. C. 8479.)

15
 sit inside and observe the heavens, Cassini's plani-
sphere was the last attempt to build a purely
physical space to record accurately the geographical
details of the world.52 The abandonment of this
project marked a turning point in map conscious-
ness. Henceforth the rational way to represent the
whole world scientifically was on paper.
In 1682 Cassini had transferred forty locations
on to a sketch map that was issued as an engraved
world map in 1696 (Fig. 6). The building of the
observatory and the collection of more accurate
measurements of latitude and longitude brought
with it an enhanced capacity to assemble geogra-
phical knowledge. That capacity was co-produced
with the emerging demands of a centralised
economy which in turn brought with it a yet
greater need for a more fully articulated knowledge
space. Such a space was achieved through the
expenditure of much physical labour in building a
network that connected all points in France and,
ultimately, linked the Paris and Greenwich obser-
vatories.
Until the late Middle Ages, the details of French
territory were known in a 'literary mode', through
itineraries, journeys and lists of places, in other
words, through assembling local knowledge con-
tained in written descriptions.54 That today the
literary mode seems clumsy and to lack rigour and
consistency shows how profound a transformation
has been produced in our mapping consciousness.
The literary form of spatial knowledge began to
prove less adequate for the needs of the state in the
mid-seventeenth century, when it became the task
of the secretary of home affairs, Jean Baptiste
Colbert, to restore the floundering French economy
and to ensure an ever-increasing income to provide
for Louis XIV's lavish expenditures. Colbert set out
to develop the nation's resources and to build an
infrastructure of roads and canals, but he was
stymied by the lack of a map of the whole of
France. Like all Europe at the time, France was a
country operating almost entirely on local knowl-
edge. All systems of weights, measures and taxes
were local; there was no centralised uniform system
of mensuration and virtually no collective topogra-
phical knowledge.55
The lack of an accurate large-scale map of the
kingdom prevented Colbert from having an over-
view of the country's resources. He first attempted
to assemble all the provincial maps and to ensure
their commensurability through the use of a
16 common scale and criteria of accuracy.56 To this
end, he instructed the provincial field commis-
sioners to evaluate their maps and send their
amended versions to Paris. Most commissioners
failed to comply.
That provincial maps already existed was not in
itself sufficient to ensure their assemblage at a
centre of calculation.57 To achieve such an assem-
blage two problems had to be solved, one social and
one technical. The provincial administrators had to
be persuaded to cooperate in a national project
which they saw as a way of organising their
resources for the benefit of the king. At the same
time, as Colbert had recognised, the provincial
maps could not be assembled unless and until they
had been rendered commensurable. Faced with
these political and technical problems of assem-
blage, Cassini, Jean Picard and the Academie
proposed the creation of a network of surveyed
triangles that would encompass the country and
thereby would enable the drawing of a unified map
of France on one grid. The proposed network of
triangles would also link Paris to every part of the
kingdom by invisible but powerful, 'terraforming',
bonds. France would never be the same again;
when the new map showed France to be smaller
than previously believed, Louis XIV complained, 'I
paid my academicians well and they have dimin-
ished my kingdom.' Nor was 'knowing' France ever
the same again. As Herv6 has remarked,
Cartographybecame inseparablefrom the affirmation
of monarchicpower ... The king could now sit in his
chamber and 'without troublinghimself greatly, see
with his eye and touch with his finger'the expanseand
diversityof his territory-without having to travel at
all.58
Indeed, the king did not have to go to the purpose-
built 'world shrinking room' at the observatory. He
could survey the details of his empire in his own
bedroom.
The network of triangles could provide a solution
to the general technical problem of assembling the
separate topographical surveys of the country. A
centralised, Academie-based approach would also
provide a political solution, if the king could be
sufficiently diverted from his military ambitions to
fund the project. Ultimately, the national map
could only be achieved by bringing into line the
king, Jupiter's satellites, pendulum clocks, tele-
scopes, surveying chains, trigonometry, quadrants,
new printing techniques, and all the provinces of
France as well as the Earth itself. In aligning all
these places, practices, people and instruments a
 9f6te Jea'uAY

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10 <f W~~~~Aro
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(Paris 17)plte 2.(C ursey of

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 new space was created, a space that we now take
for granted but which did not come into existence
naturally or even easily.
The first discussions of the project were held in
1663. Eventually, it was proposed that J. D. Cassini
should survey a line from Dunkerque to Barcelona
(Fig. 7). This would have the co-dependent purpose
of enabling the measurement of the circumference
of the earth and providing the baseline for all future
surveying operations in France. A hitherto inde-
pendent geodetic problem concerned the sphericity
of the earth.59 Was it a perfect sphere, a prolate
spheroid (elongated at the poles) or an oblate one
(flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator)?
Once again, the question arose that had bothered
Portuguese and Spanish navigators and cartogra-
phers for a century and a half: what is the length of
a degree of latitude? Did it vary with distance from
the pole and if so did it increase or decrease as the
pole was approached? The related controversy
demanded a realignment not only of ideas about
the shape of the earth but also in the rivalry
between French and English science. Newton's
theory of gravity indicated an oblateness of the
earth, while French theory and early measure-
ments seemed to indicate a prolate spheroid. The
disagreement created yet more pressure for greater
accuracy in measuring the length of a degree.
Eventually, Louis XV ordered a decisive test. Two
arcs were to be measured, one near the equator in
Peru (1735-1744), and one near the Arctic circle in
Lapland (1734-1737). The 'toise of Peru' proved
longer than that of Lapland, and the Paris meridian
had to be resurveyed (1740).6
By 1739 'France was enclosed by an uninter-
rupted chain of 400 triangles surveyed from 18
fundamental bases'.6' But that was only the
beginning; not until 1744 was the first outline
map produced.62 The complete topographical sur-
vey resulting in the publication of the Carte de
Cassini was not finished until 1789. Altogether it
took 121 years of arduous labour by vast numbers
of people at a cost of some 700,000 livres to
produce the first national map of France.63
The Cartede Cassiniis important historically not
just because it was the first thorough topographical
survey of an entire country. 'It taught the rest of the
world what to do and what not to do.'64 It
established the practice, subsequently adopted by
all national mapping projects, of linking topogra-
phical surveys with a chain of great triangles. It also
18 instigated the transformation of spatial knowledge
according to a centralised, homogenised and
mathematised schema.
The implementation of such a schema is essen-
tially a process of standardisation, which is techni-
cally difficult. In fact in the French case, according
to Revel,
a standardisednationalmap provedextremelyhardto
achievebecauseof the difficultiesof integratingall the
heterogeneous local information.Cassini'sproject of
mappingall Franceproducedvery flawed resultsbeing
useful only for broadadministrativedistinctions.65
But standardisation is also an inherently social
process, requiring conventions, negotiations and
agreements. It has become one of the key processes
in modern science, whereby local knowledge/
practices can be assembled. Just as it was possible
for nineteenth-century American railroads to run
on their own private times, so too was it possible to
have different kinds of national maps based on their
own local organisation of space.66 But to integrate
the railroads or to have a map of the world requires
laborious processes of standardisation of time and
space. All places and times have to be rendered
equivalent.
The First Trans-NationalKnowledgeSpace
Such social processes were inherent in what, in
1783, was to be the first international cooperative
mapping venture. The initial pressure for this
transformation of international space did not
come from either military or economic forces as
one might expect. Rather, it came largely from the
demands of a rapidly internationalising science. The
technical problem was to measure precisely the
difference in latitude and longitude between the
Paris and Greenwich observatories,67 over which
the English and French astronomers disagreed by a
matter of 11 seconds of longitude and 15 seconds of
latitude, which on the ground amounts to roughly
500 metres.68 Such technical questions are not, of
course, sui generis; they are co-produced with the
instruments and practices that make possible both
their formulation and their solution.69 Concomitant
with that enabling process is the creation of the
kind of homogeneous and unified spaces in which
science's universalised forms of knowledge become
possible through the linking of local knowledge
spaces. In turn, the creation of such a scientific
knowledge space generates a different social space.
CUsar Fran~ois Cassini de Thury (Cassini III)
suggested that the astronomical problem could be
solved by a trigonometric survey from Greenwich

Fig. 8. Plan of the Trianglesconnectingthe Meridiansof the Royal Observatories
OrdnanceSurvey:Map Makersto Britain since 1791 (Ordnance Survey, Southampton 1992).
to Dover and a triangulated connection to the
French national survey, thereby expanding the
isolated spaces of the two observatories into one
homogeneous space (Fig. 8). For General William
Roy, who carried out the survey at the behest of Sir
Joseph Banks, the initial problem was to develop
instruments of sufficient reliability and accuracy to
measure the five-mile baseline. Roy had hoped to
use a steel chain whose variations could be checked
with deal rods. However, it was found the length of
the rods varied with humidity, and the survey was
ultimately done with long glass tubes. It then took
another three years to develop a theodolite capable
of measuring the fractions of seconds of arc which
Roy deemed necessary for his ultimate purpose, the
beginning of a national survey of the British Isles.70
In 1787 England and France were invisibly but
indissolubly linked. The connection between the two
national spaces was established by trigonometric
triangulation using lights and the new theodolite at
night to span the Channel. However, the problem of
creating equivalence between the pieces of hetero-
geneous information was not so easily resolved. First,
the French toise had to be converted to the English
league. Then, having established an agreed linear
distance between the meridians of Paris and Green-
wich, there were difficulties in converting this value
into degrees, since, once again, this depended on
agreement about the precise length of a degree and the
shape of the Earth.In addition, there were problemsin
establishing the difference in clock time between the
meridians. Only when social means were found to
of Greenwichand Paris, 1787. Reproduced from
solve these seemingly technical problems could the
astronomers measure the differences between their
observatories,thereby creating one unified knowledge
space and hence a new international and political
space. The establishment of this new international
space set in motion the process whereby the whole of
the earth's territorycould be mapped as one. All sites
would be rendered equivalent, all localness would
vanish in the homogenisation and geometrisation of
space. To this day the project remains incomplete.
Even though the international geoid system was
accepted in 1980, the conversion of national surveys
to this common reference surface still produces local
difficulties.7'
In order to achieve the kind of universal and
accurate knowledge that constitutes modern
science and cartography, local knowledge, person-
nel and instrumentation have to be assembled on a
national and international scale. This level of
organisation is only possible when the state, science
and cartography become integrated. The first
scientific institutions in Europe-the hydrographic
offices in the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la
Contratacion-went a long way towards achieving
that degree of integration. Though ultimately a
failure, they were examples of the kind of
organisation that was later developed in the
integration of science, cartography and the interests
of the state in the triangulation of France and the
subsequent linking of the French and English
national surveys.72 19
 This linking created a trans-national knowledge
space whose ramified bureaucratic structure in
providing the conditions for the possibility of
modern science and cartography has the appearance
of determining all our knowledge. However, such a
knowledge space is not entirely hegemonic; resis-
tance is possible because it has its own contra-
dictions and other registers and modes of mapping
are available. On the one hand, we seem to be on
the verge of establishing just such a hegemonic
knowledge space, where the demands of the
consumer economy and the structures of the
cartographical knowledge space have become so
intermeshed that MacDonalds now use Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) to determine the loca-
tion of new franchise outlets.73 On the other hand,
despite all the bureaucratic organisation and agree-
ments about scale, projection, meridians et cetera
that have gone into the globalisation of society, and
despite the talk of the global village and commu-
nication super highways, the 'totalisation project'
postmodernists fear so much is neither complete nor
irresistible. For example, Western modes of knowl-
edge assembly have proved inadequate in the third
world where alternate modes are emerging as
potential sites of resistance.74 However, the greatest
opportunities for resistance lie in the recognition
that the social labour of creating knowledge spaces
has been largely suppressed and obliterated in the
attempt to portray science as universal, non-local
and unsituated. Precisely because knowledge spaces
are social constructions we can construct alternative
spaces or positions from which to know the world.
ManuscriptsubmittedApril 1994. RevisedtextreceivedDecember
1995.
NOTESAND REFERENCES
1. Marshall McLuhan, UnderstandingMedia, The Exten-
sions of Man (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964), 157.
2. The point was first made by William M. Ivins, 'We
would not have had modern science and technology
without exactly repeatable pictorial statements' (Printsand
Visual Communication [Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 19531, 3). See also Helen Gardner cited in Robert
A. Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom and Dream
(London, Routledge, 1989), 33. The argument has
recently been persuasively developed by Bruno Latour,
'Visualisation and cognition, thinking with eyes and
hands', Knowledgeand Society6 (1986): 1-40.
3. Strictly speaking the earliest works in the sociology of
science were Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Developmentof a
Scientific Fact [19351 (2nd ed., Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1979), and Karl Mannheim, Ideology and
Utopia (London, Kegan Paul, 1936), but the sociology of
20 scientific knowledge was largely ignored until Thomas
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago,
Chicago University Press, 1962).
4. Barry Barnes, ScientificKnowledgeand SociologicalTheory
(London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); David Bloor,
Knowledgeand Social Imagery (London, Routledge, 1976);
Harry Collins, Changing Order,Replicationand Induction in
ScientificPractice(London, Sage, 1985); Karin Knorr-Cetina,
The Manufactureof Knowledge,an Essay on the Constructivist
and ContextualNature of Science(Oxford, Pergamon Press,
1981); Michael Mulkay, Scienceand the Sociologyof Knowl-
edge (London, 1979); Bruno Latour, Science in Action
(Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1987). The most
recent general work in SSK is presented in Sheila Jasanoff
et al., eds., Handbook of Science and TechnologyStudies
(Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 1995).
5. David Turnbull, 'Local knowledge and comparative
scientific traditions', Knowledgeand Policy6 (1993): 29-54.
6. Much of this theoretical framework has been devel-
oped under the rubric actor-network theory by Bruno
Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. See, for example,
Michel Callon, 'Some elements of a sociology of transla-
tion: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St.
Brieuc Bay', in Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociologyof
Knowledge?ed. John Law (London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1986), 196-233; Michel Callon, John Law et al.,
eds., Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology;
Sociologyof Sciencein the Real World (London, Macmillan,
1986); Bruno Latour, 'The powers of association', in Law,
Power, Action and Belief (see above, this note); Latour,
Sciencein Action (see note 4); John Law, ed., A Sociologyof
Monsters: Essays on Power Technology and Domination,
Sociological Review Monograph 38 (London, Routledge,
1991). On the struggle for authority see Pierre Bourdieu,
'The specificity of the scientific field and the social
conditions of the progress of reason', Social Science
Information 14 (1975): 19-47; and also Adi Ophir and
Steven Shapin, 'The place of knowledge, a methodological
survey', Sciencein Context4 (1991): 3-2 1.
7. David Turnbull, 'The ad hoc collective work of
building Gothic cathedrals with templates, string, and
geometry', ScienceTechnologyand Human Values 18 (1993):
315-40. On the process of establishing equivalences or
making commensurable the heterogeneous see Latour,
Science in Action (note 4) and Bruno Latour, The
Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 1988). The evocative term "motley' is used by Ian
Hacking, 'The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences',
in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992): 29-64.
8. John Law, 'Technology and heterogeneous engineer-
ing, the case of Portuguese expansion', in The Social
Constructionof TechnologicalSystems, New Directionsin the
Sociology and History of Technology,ed. W. Bijker et al.
(Cambridge, MIT Press, 1987): 111-34. I have adopted the
term 'assemblage' from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
A ThousandPlateaus;Capitalismand Schizophrenia(Minnea-
polis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90. For
discussion see David Turnbull, 'Rendering turbulence
orderly', Social Studiesof Science25 (1995): 9-33.
9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford,
Blackwell, 1991), 32, distinguishes representations of
space and representational spaces as conceptual and
lived spaces respectively, whereas knowledge spaces are
here conceived as a melding of the two.
10. J. Brian Harley, 'Deconstructing the map', Cartogra-
phica 26 (1989): 1-20. 'The normative history of carto-
graphy is a ceaseless massaging of this theme of noble
progress ... It is the dominant theme' (p. 4). 'The history
of cartography is largely that of the increase in the
accuracy with which ... elements of distance and
direction are determined and the comprehensiveness of
the map's content' (Gerald Crone, Maps and TheirMakers
(Folkstone, Dawson, 1953), xi). See also Denis Wood, The
Powerof Maps (New York, Guilford Press, 1992); Matthew
H. Edney, 'Cartography without "progress": reinterpret-
ing the nature and historical development of mapmaking',
Cartographica30: 2-3 (1993): 54-68; J. Brian Harley,
'Cartography, ethics and social theory', Cartographica27: 1
(1990): 1-23.
11. For the received view see Arthur H. Robinson and
Barbara B. Petchenik, The Nature of Maps, Essays towards
UnderstandingMaps and Mapping (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1976); on spatialisation see David Turnbull,
'Constructing knowledge spaces and locating sites of
resistance in the modern cartographic transformation', in
Rolland Paulston, ed., Social Cartography:Mapping Waysof
Seeing Education and Social Change (New York, Garland
Publishing Inc. forthcoming); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern
Geographies,the Reassertionof Space in CriticalSocial Theory
(London, Verso, 1989); and David Harvey, The Conditionof
Postmodernity(Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); on maps and
science see Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium,
the Discovery of New Geographies (New York, Random
House, 1992). On the continuing influence of positivism,
especially in GIS, see Robert Lake, 'Planning and applied
geography: positivism, ethics, and geographic information
systems', Progressin Human Geography17 (1993): 404-53.
12. Edney, 'Cartography without progress' (see note 10);
Barbara Belyea, 'Images of power, Derrida/Foucault/
Harley', Cartographica29: 2 (1992): 1-9; David Turnbull,
Maps Are Territories;ScienceIs an Atlas (Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 1993); David Woodward, 'Reality,
symbolism, time and space in medieval world maps',
Annals of the Associationof AmericanGeographers75 (1985):
510-21; David Woodward, 'Roger Bacon's terrestrial
coordinate system', Annals of the Associationof American
Geographers80 (1990): 109-22; Denis Wood, 'How maps
work', Cartographica29: 3-4 (1992): 66-74; Michael
Blakemore and J. Brian Harley, Conceptsin the History of
Cartography:A Review and Perspective,Monograph 26,
Cartographica 17: 4 (1980); J. Brian Harley, 'Maps,
knowledge and power', in The Iconographyof Landscape,
ed. D. Cosgrove, and S. Daniels (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 277-312; John Pickles, 'Text,
hermeneutics and propaganda maps', in Writing Worlds:
Discourse,Text and Metaphor in the Representationof Land-
scape, ed. T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (London,
Routledge, 1992), 193-230.
13. J. Brian Harley, 'Silences and secrecy, the hidden
agenda of cartography in early modern Europe', Imago
Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76, ref. 57.
14. J. Brian Harley, 'Power and legitimation in the
English geographical atlases of the eighteenth century', in
Imagesof the World:Essayson the Historyof the Atlas, ed. J. A.
Wolter and R. E. Grim (Washington, Library of Congress,
forthcoming).
15. Some of these alternatives are discussed in Turnbull,
MapsAre Territories(see note 12). The possibility of science
being 'other than it is' is one of the central themes of SSK;
see, for example, Pickering, Scienceas Practiceand Culture
(note 7).
16. 'One who sees is one who sees within a prescribed
set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of
conventions and limitations' (Jonathon Crary, Techniques
of the Observer,on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century[Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990], 6).
17. On modes of mapping see Matthew H. Edney,
'Cartography without progress' (note 10); on archives
see Barbara Belyea, 'Images of power' (note 12); on
spatial discourses see Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped:
A Historyof the Geo-Bodyof a Nation (Honolulu, University
of Hawaii Press, 1994).
18. On cross-cultural comparisons of maps see Turnbull,
MapsAre Territories(note 12); and David Turnbull, Mapping
the World in the Mind, an Investigation of the Unwritten
Knowledgeof the MicronesianNavigators (Geelong, Deakin
University Press, 1991). On historical modes and overlaps
see Woodward, 'Reality, symbolism, time and space in
medieval world maps' (note 12), and Woodward, 'Roger
Bacon's terrestrial coordinate system', (note 12); Turnbull,
'Constructing knowledge spaces' (note 11).
19. On 'the pattern that connects' see Gregory Bateson,
Mind and Nature, a Necessary Unity (New York, Dutton,
1979). On links to the social order see Wood, ThePowerof
Maps (note 10), 10 and passim but especially Chapter 3.
20. Pierre Bourdieu, Outlineof a Theoryof Practice(Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also
Nicholas Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of
Power (New York, Guilford Press, 1994), 8.
21. Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning, an Introductionto
CulturalGeography(London, Unwin Hyman, 1989), 185-86.
22. Turnbull, Maps Are Territories(see note 12); Wood-
ward, 'Reality, symbolism, time and space' (see note 12);
Woodward, 'Roger Bacon's terrestrial coordinate system'
(see note 12); Robert A. Rundstrom, 'A cultural inter-
pretation of Inuit map accuracy', GeographicalReview 80
(1990): 155-68; Robert A. Rundstrom, 'Mapping, post-
modernism, indigenous people and the changing direction
of North American cartography', Cartographica 28: 2
(1991): 1-12; Benjamin S. Orlove, 'Mapping reeds and
reading maps, the politics of representation in Lake
Titicaca', AmericanEthnologist18 (1991): 3-38; Benjamin
Orlove, 'The ethnography of maps', Cartographica 30
(1993): 29-46; Helen Watson with the Yolgnu community
at Yirrkala and David Wade Chambers, Singing the Land,
Signing the Land (Geelong, Deakin University Press, 1989).
'There are other knowledges of space either residual or
emerging operating to contend with the geo-body'
(Winichakul, Siam Mapped [see note 17], 131).
23. In Lisbon Jodo H (1455-1495) set up what was first
called the Casa de Guine, then the Casa de Mina e India,
and finally the Casa de India. This institution held a
Padreo Real under the charge of Lopo Homem, cosmo-
grapher to the King Manuel, and Pedro Reinel, master of
navigational charts (Michel Mollat du Jourdin and
Monique de La Ronciere, Sea Chartsof the Early Explorers:
13th to 17th Century[London, Thames and Hudson, 1984],
26; see also Bailey Diffie and George Winius, Foundations
of the PortugueseEmpire, 1415-1580 [Minneapolis, Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1977], 316-17).
24. E. L. Stevenson, 'The geographical activities of the
Casa de la Contrataci6n', Annals of the Association of
American Geographers,17: 2 (1927), 39-59; Jose Pulido
Rubio, El Piloto Mayor de la Casa de Contratacidnde Seville
(Seville, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1950);
Henry Harrisse, The Discoveryof North America, A Critical
Documentary,and HistoricInvestigation.1892 (Amsterdam,
N. Israel, 1961), 258-59. There is some disagreement
about whether a serious attempt was made to maintain
the policy of secrecy that is sometimes implied in accounts
of these offices, but both Portugal and Spain wanted to
achieve high degrees of accuracy in their charts in order to
determine the location and ownership of the new
discoveries and to avoid expensive shipping losses. Bailey 21
 W. Diffie, 'Foreigners in Portugal and the "policy of
silence"', Terrae Incognitae 1 (1960): 23-35; Kenneth
McIntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia, Portuguese
Ventures 200 Years before Captain Cook (Menindie, Souve-
nier Press, 1977).
25. Pulido Rubio made the suggestion that the Casa de la
Contrataci6n was the first scientific cultural institution
more than forty years ago, but little attention has been
paid to his claim by historians of science. His account
shows that the two Casas were indeed the first scientific
institutions because they were centres of calculation in the
Latourian sense. Pulido Rubio, El Piloto Mayor (see note
24), 433; Latour, Sciencein Action (see note 4). See also G.
Beaujouan, 'Science livresque et art nautique au XV
siele', in M. Mollat du Jourdin and P. Adam, eds., Les
Aspects internationaux de la dicouverte oceanique aux XVieme et
XVIieme sieces. Actes du cinquieme Colloque International
d'Histoire Maritime (Lisbone 1960) (Paris, tcole Practique des
Hautes etudes, 1966); David W. Waters, 'Science and the
techniques of navigation in the Renaissance', Maritime
Monographs and Reports 19 (1974): 28.
26. Law, 'Technology and heterogeneous engineering'
(note 8). See also John Law, 'On the methods of long
distance control, vessels, navigation and the Portuguese
route to India', in Law, Power, Action and Belief (note 6),
234-63; John Law, 'On the social explanation of technical
change, the case of the Portuguese maritime expansion',
Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 227-53.
27. David W. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of
navigation' (see note 25), 28, quotes Beaujouan, 'Science
livresque' (see note 25), 13-14: 'The birth of nautical
astronomy was much less a problem of science than of
organisation ... King John II of Portugal had the
immense merit of having known before any other head of
state, how to organise the technical exploitation of
contemporary theoretical knowledge'.
28. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of navigation'
(see note 25), 16; Veitia Linaje, Spanish Rule of Trade to the
West Indies [1702] (reprinted, New York, AMS Press,
1977), 248-49.
29. Kenneth Nebenzahl, Maps from the Age of Discovery,
Columbus to Mercator (London, Times Books, 1990), ix,
234.
30. Waters, 'Science and the techniques of navigation
(see note 25), 16.
31. Portolan charts were the first commercially produced
charts. They were considered so essential that from the
mid-14th century Aragonese ship captains were required
by law to carry two copies on their voyages (Tony
Campbell, 'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth
century to 1500', in The History of Cartography, Vol. 1,
Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and
the Mediterranean,ed. J. Brian Harley and David Wood-
ward (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), 404, n.
253).
32. Tony Campbell, 'Traditional warnings and coastal
dangers', in Tales from the Map Room, Fact and Fiction about
Maps and Their Makers, ed. Peter Barber and Christopher
Broad (London, BBC, 1993), 162-63.
33. Robin Horton, 'African traditional thought and
Western science', Africa 37 (1967): 50-71, 155-87;
Robin Horton, 'Tradition and modernity revisited', in
Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes
(Oxford, Blackwell, 1982), 201-60.
34. On analogous ad hoc assemblages see Turnbull, 'The
ad hoc collective work of building Gothic cathedrals' (note
7). On directionality see note 37 below.
22 35. Campbell, 'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth
century to 1500' (see note 31), 387; A. N. Nordenskibld,
Periplus, an Essay on the Early Historyof Chartsand Sailing
Directions(Stockholm, P. A. Norstedt, 1897); James Kelley,
'The oldest portolan chart in the world', TerraeIncognitae9
(1977): 22-48.
36. Woodward's explanation is proposed in Campbell,
'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth century to 1500'
(see note 31), 387-88.
37. Denoix, in Mollat du Jourdin and de La Ronciere,
Sea Chartsof the Early Explorers(see note 23), 15.
38. The anthropologist Charles Frake in considering the
seafaring ability of North Sea medieval sailors has argued
that 'similar schema for segmenting the circle of the
horizon with invariant directional axes characterises all
known early seafaring traditions, those of the Pacific, the
China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Europe. In various
traditions, compass directions could be thought of as, and
named for, star paths (as in the Pacific and Indian Ocean)
or wind directions (as in island Southeast Asia and
Europe). In all cases the compass rose provided an
invariant representation of directions which were in fact
determined at sea by a variety of means, the sun, the stars,
winds, swells, landmarks, seamarks, sea life and in later
times the magnetic needle. The information provided by
these diverse and changing signs was represented men-
tally as a named direction on the compass rose. A
cognitive schema of invariant directions is necessary not
only for assessing present direction, but equally important
for thinking about direction. The compass rose was, in
essence, a cognitive scheme for organising, remembering
and manipulating directional information. It was only
secondarily a physical device for finding direction'
(Charles 0. Frake, 'Cognitive maps of time and tide
among medieval seafarers', Man 20 (1985): 254-70).
A northern sailor could 'establish a port' through an
integrated assembly of time, tide, winds and moon in
terms of direction. The time of high water on days of full
and change moon could be expressed as north-south
moon if it occurred at noon and midnight, as south-east,
north-west moon if it occurred at 9 am and 9 pm (Waters,
'Science and the techniques of navigation' (see note 25),
2). See also Turnbull, Mapping the Worldin the Mind (note
18); and Edwin Hutchins, 'Understanding Micronesian
navigation', in Mental Models, ed. D. Gentner and A. L.
Stevens (New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1983), 191-226.
39. Law, 'Technology and heterogeneous engineering
(see note 8), 126; Law, 'On the social explanation of
technical change' (see note 26), 244.
40. Armando Cortesdo and Avelino Teixera da Mota,
Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica (Lisbon, Museo
Nacional de Arte Antiga, 1960), 90.
41. Stability has become a key problematic following the
development of actor-network theory. See John Law and
Wiebe Bijker, 'Postscript, technology, stability, and social
theory', in Shaping Technology/BuildingSociety, Studies in
SociotechnicalChange, ed. Wiebe Bijker and John Law
(Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1992), 201-24.
42. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan
and the Air Pump, Hobbes, Boyle and the ExperimentalLife
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985); and Steven
Shapin, A Social Historyof Truth:Civilityand Sciencein 17th
Century England (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1994), for seminal accounts of the way experimental
knowledge was established as authoritative in 17th-
century England, through the introduction of a variety
of technologies of representation.
43. Harrisse, Discovery(see note 24), 264-65.
 44. The details of the following disputes are drawn from
the illuminating account given in Ursula Lamb, 'Science
by litigation, a cosmographic feud', Terrae Incognitae 1
(1969): 40-57, esp. p. 42; and Ursula Lamb, 'The Spanish
cosmographic juntas of the sixteenth century', Terrae
Incognitae6 (1974): 51-64.
45. Gutierrezhad developed two solutions to the phenom-
enon of magnetic variation, a problem that became apparent
as the knowledge space grew more structured.Mariners had
found that compass readings varied as one moved and that
they did not always concur with directions determined by
solar position, though why this should happen was not
understood at the time. Was it a characteristicof the compass
and hence an artefact, or was it a terrestrialphenomenon, or
even a celestial one? Gutierrez's solution was to make
compasses with fixed compensation and to draw charts with
different latitude scales for each side of the Atlantic. This
eliminated the variation in some circumstances but com-
pounded it in others.
46. Lamb, 'The Spanish cosmographic juntas' (see note
44), 59. Between 1569 and 1577 the Consejo Real y
Supremo de las Indias tried similar sociological techniques
and sent out questionnaires to establish the latitude and
longitude of places in the New World. On the whole this
attempt to assemble the empire failed because of the lack
of trained and disciplined personnel. Many failed to
answer the questionnaire; those who did often misunder-
stood the questions or the instructions on making
observations or gave inaccurate responses (Clinton R.
Edwards, 'Mapping by questionnaire, an early Spanish
attempt to determine New World geographical positions',
ImagoMundi 23 (1969): 17-28, esp. 17-18).
47. James Burke, The Day the UniverseChanged(London,
BBC, 1985).
48. Eric G. Forbes, Tobias Mayer (1723-62), Pioneer of
EnlightenedSciencein Germany(Gottingen, 1980), 63. I owe
this reference and the following point to an anonymous
referee, whom I would like to thank for his useful and
constructive comments.
49. Kevin Krisciunas, AstronomicalCentersof the World
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 64-65; C.
Wolf, Histoirede l'Observatoirede Paris de sa fondationa 1793
(Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1902).
50. Lloyd Brown, The Story of Maps (Boston, Little
Brown, 1949): 219.
51. Christian Jacob, L 'Empiredes cartes.Approchethiorique
de la cartesa travers l'histoire (Paris, Albin Michel, 1992),
131-32.
52. On the display of globes see Giulio Macchi, VL'Image
impossible', and Helen Wallis and Monique Pelletier, 'Les
Globes du Roi Soleil', in Carteset Figuresde la Terre(Paris,
Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), xi & xii-xiv.
53. Crone, Maps and TheirMakers (see note 10), 88.
54. On the literary mode see J. Revel, 'Knowledge of the
territory', Science in Context4 (1991): 133-61. Buisseret
notes that by the time Louis XIV came to power there had
been a long period of map use in France beginning with
military use in the early 16th century and reaching a peak
of sophistication with Nicholas Sanson's basemaps (David
Buisseret, 'Monarchs, ministers, and maps in France
before the accession of Louis XIV', in Monarchs,Ministers
and Maps, The Emergence of Cartographyas a Tool of
Governmentin Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret
[Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992], 99-123, esp.
120). However, Joseph Konvitz, Cartographyin France,
1660-1848, Science Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2, points out the
maps were at too small a scale for effective policy. See P.
D. A. Harvey, Maps in TudorEngland (London, The Public
Record Office and The British Library, 1993), for similar
remarks about estate surveys, and Peter Barber, 'England
I: pageantry, defense, and government: maps at court to
1550', in Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps (see
above), 26-56. See Turnbull, 'Constructing knowledge
spaces' (note 11), for a general discussion of the origins of
map consciousness and the use of maps in state decisions
in England.
55. Ronald Edward Zupko, Revolution in Measurement,
Western European Weights and Measures since the Age of
Science (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society,
1990); Witold Kula, Measuresand Men (Princeton, Prince-
ton University Press, 1986); J. L. Heilbron, 'The measure
of enlightenment', in The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th
Century,ed. Tore Frdngsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E.
Rider (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990),
207-42.
56. Buisseret, 'Monarchs, ministers, and maps in France'
(see note 54), 99.
57. Latour, 'Visualisation and cognition' (see note 2).
58. Herv6 cited in Revel, 'Knowledge of the territory'
(see note 54), 150.
59. Sven Widmalm, 'Accuracy, rhetoric and technology,
the Paris-Greenwich triangulation, 1784-88', in Frdngs-
myr, The QuantifyingSpiritin the 18th Century(see note 55),
179-206; on page 180, Cassini du Thury is quoted as
saying in 1765: 'le seul moyen de perfectionner la
geographie, 6toit de suivre pour la description d'un pays
la meme methode que 1'on avoit employee pour la
determination de la figure de la terre'.
60. Konvitz, Cartographyin France (see note 54), 10-12;
Monique Pelletier, La Carte de Cassini (Paris, Presses de
l'tcole nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, 1990), 67.
61. Brown, Storyof Maps (see note 50), 252.
62. Pelletier, La Cartede Cassini (see note 60), 69.
63. Brown, Storyof Maps (see note 50), 254.
64. Brown, Storyof Maps (see note 50), 255.
65. Revel, 'Knowledge of the territory' (see note 54),
155.
66. Eviatar Zerubavel, 'The standardization of time, a
sociohistorical perspective', American Journal of Sociology
88: 1 (1982): 1-23.
67. Widmalm, 'Accuracy, rhetoric and technology' (see
note 59).
68. W. A. Seymour, ed., A Historyof the OrdnanceSurvey
(Folkstone, Dawson, 1980), 14. The ground-difference
calculation was kindly provided by an anonymous referee.
69. See, for example, Adele E. Clarke and Joan H.
Fujimura, 'What tools? Which jobs? Why right?' in The
Right Tools for the Job, at Work in Twentieth-CenturyLife
Sciences, ed. Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992), 3-46.
70. Widmalm, 'Accuracy, rhetoric and technology' (see
note 59), 188.
71. I owe this point to one of the anonymous referees.
72. Waters suggests the failure was due to the inherent
over-regulation and inertia of centralised administrative
organisations ('Science and the techniques of navigation'
(see note 25), 16).
73. Jon Goss, "'We know who you are and we know
where you live": the instrumental rationality of geodemo-
graphic systems', EconomicGeography71 (1995): 171-98,
ref. on 175.
74. Mark Hobart, ed. An Anthropological Critique of
Development (London, Routledge, 1993); Blomley, Law,
Space,and the Geographiesof Power (see note 20); Turnbull,
'Constructing knowledge spaces' (see note 11). 23
 RESUMEI:Science et cartographic sont intimement liees dans leur histoire, qui ne consiste pas a dresser des
cartes toujours plus exactes, mais dans laquelle science, cartographic et ttat ont cree L'espacede connaissance
qui a fourni les conditions necessaires a la science et a la cartographic modernes. L'essence du developpement
cartographique reside dans la reunion de la connaissance des lieux, et ainsi est un aspect particulier des
developpements fondamentaux pour la science. On trouve reunies tres tot des tentatives par l'Etat de creer un
espace epistemologique pour la connaissance cartographique dans la peninsule iberique, oui la Casa da Mina
et la Casa de Contratacion peuvent se targuer d'etre les plus anciennes institutions scientifiques des debuts de
l'Europe moderne. Ces tentatives echouerent du fait que les cartes-portulans avaient leurs propres traditions
de navigation, independamment de L'tat. Un exemple tardif est la triangulation de la France et la liaison des
Observatoires de Greenwich et de Paris, qui crea L'espacede connaissance de la science et de la cartographic
modernes. Cependant on peut aussi trouver d'autres facons de reunir la connaissance des lieux et les espaces
de creation de la connaissance.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG:Wissenschaft und Kartographie hatten eine innige Geschichte, nicht eine von immer
genaueren Karten, sondern eine in welcher Wissenschaft, Kartographie und Staat den Kenntnisraum schufen
um die Voraussetzungen fur eine moderne Wissenschaft und Kartographie zu liefern. Der zentrale
kartographische ProzeB ist eine Ansammlung von ortlicher Kenntnis. Es ist eine besondere Form des
Prozeles, fundamental gegenuber jeder Wissenschaft. Fruhe Beispiele von Bemiihungen durch den Staat um
einen erkenntnistheoretischen Raum zu schaffen, in welchem kartographische Kenntnis zusammengetragen
werden konnte, waren auf der Iberischen Halbinsel, wo die Casa da Mina und die Casa de la Contratacion sich
berufen konnen die ersten wissenschaftliche Institute des fruhen modernen Europas zu sein. Diese
Bemuhungen miglungen da die Portolankarten ihre eigenen, vom Staat unabhangigen, Navigationstradi-
tionen hatten. Ein spateres Beispiel ist die Triangulation von Frankreich, und die Zusammenarbeit der
Observatorien in Greenwich und Paris, welche den Kenntnisraum der modernen Wissenschaft und
Kartographie grundeten. Auch alternative Wege der Zusammenstellung von lokaler Kenntnis und der
Schaffung von Kenntnisraumen konnen ebenfalls gefunden werden.

A Carto-bibliography of New England

Barbara McCorkle is working on a project to identify all pre-1900 maps showing New England. While there
have been good carto-bibliographical studies of other areas of the United States, such as Louis Karpinski,
HistoricalAtlas of the GreatLakesand Michigan ( 1931); Henry Raup Wagner, Cartographyof the NorthwestCoastof
Americato the Year1800 (1937); Carl Wheat, Mappingthe TransmississippiWest(1957); and William Cumming,
TheSoutheastin EarlyMaps (1958), and several recent books for the Gulf Coast, including James C. Martin and
Robert S. Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, 1513-1900 (1984), there has been no comprehensive
treatment of New England, one of the earliest settled and historically most important areas of the country. The
aim of the project, which is sponsored by the John Carter Brown Library, is to produce a carto-bibliography
with the following coverage: maps of the Western Hemisphere before 1600, maps of North America or of its
northeastern part before 1700, and maps of northeastern North America before 1800. The net is spread
especially widely for the early years because it was some time before the area which eventually became New
24 England came under specific cartographical scrutiny.