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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, editors. Mapping and Empire: Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 204. $34.95.
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| This book provides an important and detailed account of the various cartographic histories of Spain's northern frontier in the Americas, which would later become the U.S. Southwest. Edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, it consists of six substantive essays by scholars with expertise in cartographic history. Mining the impressive map collection at the University of Texas at Arlington's Center for Greater Southwestern Studies, these essays provide an impressive overview of the maps produced by soldier-engineers from the earliest period of Spanish maritime exploration through the era following the U.S.-Mexican war. |
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The introduction by Richard V. Francaviglia lays out the key parameters of the volume, namely the focus on the role of the military, rather than the church or state, in expansion and mapping. As the title suggests, mapping and empire went hand in hand as various governments sought to make terra incognita legible and assert their claims over vast, sparsely populated territories. Francaviglia points to the devastating consequences for native people who "bore the brunt of expansion" (p. xvi), but the essays in the volume do little to examine these conflicts or to explore the alternative mappings that native people had of their homelands. The summary of the chapters provided in the introduction helps to situate the reader and highlight some of the main arguments but does not provide an analytical framework that could have helped bring all of the essays into conversation with one another. |
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Half of the book addresses mapping done on behalf of the Spanish crown on their northern frontier in the Americas, begging the question as to why the title refers exclusively to the "Southwest Frontier." W. Michael Mathes's essay, "Spanish Maritime Charting of the Gulf of Mexico and the California Coast," provides a detailed account of the extensive mapping of coastlines by the Spanish, arguing that these maps were generally not made public to protect these territories from challenges by European rivals. Through espionage and treason, however, Spanish maps eventually made their way into the hands of British, French, and Dutch explorers who entered "Spanish territory with impunity" by the eighteenth century (p. 3). David Buisseret's chapter on "Spanish Military Engineers in the New World Before 1750" traces the fascinating history of engineering and fort architecture, showing how the use of Italian engineers gave way to a specialized corps of engineers in the Spanish Army by the late seventeenth century. The story of the Italian engineer Leonardo Torriani (ca. 1559–1628), who worked in Prague, then mapped the Canary Islands for Spain, and finally became a royal architect for Portugal, is emblematic of the cosmopolitan trajectories of this newly emerging professional class. Torriani's tantalizing map of the Canary Islands with an image of a crab superimposed, printed in a luxurious color glossy reproduction, left me wanting more visual analysis. The author briefly mentions that Torriani wrote a narrative describing the indigenous inhabitants of the island at the moment of their destruction, but he does not examine how this engineer's views of the natives may have influenced his idiosyncratic visual depiction of the islands. There seems to be more here than meets the eye. |
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