After the Map

Reviews / Votes

"This ambitious and detailed book, elegantly written and illustrated, offers a history of the mapping sciences--or, more precisely, "geographic tools" and "geo-epistemology"--in the 20th century. Moving across cartography, geodesy, and navigation, cartographer Rankin traces a gradual but significant shift in the "nature of territory" from a world of cartographic representation firmly tied to the space of the nation-state to very different understandings premised on the coordinates of the global positioning system (GPS). Alongside detailed historical excavation, the text's strength is its serious, even unprecedented, attempt to draw together scholarship in cartography and historical geography with the history of science--and with a dose of diplomatic or international history, too. Rankin clearly possesses a formidable understanding of his subject, and approaches maps and related technologies with a delightful precision."--Choice "[A] worthy addition to the literature."--Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly "After the Map is an ambitious, tightly focused, yet wide-ranging study of the transformation of mapping sciences, from the first international effort to create a unified map of the earth's surface to today's ubiquitous Global Positioning System."--The AAG Review of Books "In following an historical trajectory by way of its investigation into the IMW, UTM and GPS, After the Map examines the present and looks to the future."--The Globe "In William Rankin's ambitious book After the Map, he explains how this shift in mapping practices not only tracked the geopolitical and technical transformations of the twentieth century, but also dramatically reordered our basic conceptions of spatiality as well. . . . It goes a long way towards clarifying what we actually mean when we talk about territory, globalization, and the contestation of geographic knowledge."--Historical Georgraphy "Through scrupulous attention to detail, After the Map demonstrates for readers that the theoretical and practical underpinnings of geospatial knowledge are more intricate, entangled, and politically charged than they might appear at first glance."--Southestern Geographer "Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century.... Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map. The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself."--New Books Network "After the Map Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, has a wealth of good, interesting information."--Cartographic Perspectives "Traversing varied material, institutional, and conceptual terrains, plotting shifts in how space has been represented and enacted throughout the 20th century, and rendering connections between spatial technologies and politics, After The Map ventures far beyond conventional boundaries of the history of cartography."--Reviews in History "After the Map should sit on the shelf alongside such books as Neil Smith's American Empire and Susan Schulten's The Geographical Imagination in America, as part of the pantheon of ground-breaking scholarship that captures that inescapably spatial twentieth century."--Imago Mundi "After the Map is as prodigiously capacious and ground-breaking as the successive representations of the world that it recounts. It not only traces the progression since the late nineteenth century from terrain-based maps, through location by latitude-and-longitude-free grids, to orientation by points in GPS space, but it also convincingly analyzes what drove these cartographic shifts, spotlighting the dynamic interplay among technical knowledge and practices, military and navigational needs, and changing ideas of territory and sovereignty. Deeply researched and lucidly written, After the Map is an important, eye-opening, and compelling work."--Daniel Kevles, Yale University "After the Map uniquely addresses important questions about the changing nature of territoriality in the twentieth century. The book is thus highly recommended to historians of science--and historians more generally--who have an interest in politics, space, and territoriality, as well as to those inquisitive minds who want to cast a spatial glance into the twenty-first century."--ISIS "How do we place ourselves in space? Do we imagine large, contiguous territories or isolated points on a grid? Rankin traces three waves of geographic knowledge-making over the twentieth century. Forged or foiled by wars and treaties, technological capabilities, navigational imperatives, and cartographic imaginations, each mapping scheme reflected shifting notions of how best to find our place in the world. After the Map is profoundly researched and utterly fascinating."--David Kaiser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "In this tour de force study, Rankin maps mapping, demonstrating just how radically the global map evolved over the long twentieth century. He brings us from the 1890s, when treaties produced the first true global map system, through the military grids that marked every spot for building, digging, and targeting. Finally, Rankin displays, in a fresh new way, how we have come to move in a pointillist, instrument-ready GPS world--the third great moment of modern world mapping. Map may not be territory, but with After the Map, Rankin shows us how mapping has remade contemporary territory and reconfigured the political geography of space itself."--Peter Galison, Harvard University