The public life of maps: new social histories of maps and their makers

摘要

It is now over 20 years since the death of Brian Harley, who was working towards a book to be called 'The Map as Ideology' at the time. As Paul Laxton describes in The New Nature of Maps (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Harley hoped that his book would seek 'to illustrate the possibility of writing a social history of the map rather than one which is mainly antiquarian, bibliographical or technical in its emphasis'. Although Harley's book was never to be completed, his writings had already been moving in the direction of looking at maps as documents produced in a particular social and historical context. Others, too, were joining him and were developing similar ideas. I hope that he would therefore have welcomed all the volumes reviewed here, each of which in its own way is linked both to the Ordnance Survey, about which Harley had published, and to his wider interests.