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Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A

View from the OutsidePhilip E. Steinberg

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aDepartment of Geography, Florida State University,

Published online: 18 Jun 2009.

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Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mappingof Mobility: A View from the Outside

Philip E. Steinberg

Department of Geography, Florida State University

Theorists within and beyond the discipline of geography increasingly realize that boundaries are not simply linesthat enclose and define territories. Boundaries also regulate and are reproduced by acts of movement. Movement,beyond and across, as well as within a bounded territory, serves to reproduce the territory that is being bounded.It follows that to understand the history of a territorial entity one must go beyond tracing the spatially fixed

activities that occur within that territory or the discursive strategies through which the territory is made to appearnatural. One must also trace the acts of movement that occur within, across, and outside the territory’s boundariesand the designation of specific spaces of movement as beyond territorial control. In short, one cannot understandthe construction of “inside” space as a series of territories of fixity, society, modernization, and developmentwithout simultaneously understanding the construction of “outside” space as an arena of mobility that is deemedunsuitable for territorial control.

In this article, this perspective is applied to the preeminent normative territory of modernity—the sovereignstate—and attention is directed specifically to the designation of the world-ocean as a space of mobility outside

the boundaries of the state-society units that purportedly constitute the modern world. Through an analysis of representations of marine space on 591 world maps printed in Europe and the Americas between 1501 and 1800,

this article traces the construction of the ocean as an external space of mobility, antithetical to the norm of theterritorial state that also was emerging during this era. Key Words: history of cartography, mobility, ocean, stateterritoriality.

Los teoricos dentro y fuera de la disciplina geografica cada vez mas se percatan de que los lımites no son

simplemente lıneas que encierran y definen territorios. Los lımites tambien regulan los actos de movimientoy son reproducidos por este. El movimiento, mas alla y al traves de un territorio demarcado, lo mismo quedentro del mismo, sirve para reproducir el territorio as ı delimitado. De hecho, para entender la historia deuna entidad territorial se debe ir mas alla de la simple indagacion de las actividades fijadas espacialmente queocurren dentro de ese territorio, o de las estrategias del discurso mediante el cual se quiere dar apariencianatural al territorio. Tambien se deben rastrear los actos de movimiento que ocurren dentro, a traves y por

fuera de los lımites del territorio, y la designacion de espacios especıficos de movimiento fuera del controlterritorial. En pocas palabras, uno no puede entender la construccion del espacio “interno” como una serie dede territorios de fijeza, de sociedad, modernizacion y de desarrollo, sin comprender de manera simultanea la

construccion del espacio “externo” como un escenario de movilidad que se considera inadecuado para controlterritorial. Esta perspectiva se aplica en este artıculo al preeminente territorio normativo de la modernidad—elestado soberano—y la atencion es orientada especıficamente al la designacion del oceano mundial como unespacio de movilidad situado fuera de los lımites de las unidades estado-sociedad que supuestamente constituyenel mundo moderno. Mediante un analisis de las representaciones del espacio marıtimo en 591 mapas del

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(3) 2009, pp. 467–495 C 2009 by Association of American GeographersInitial submission, February 2008; revised submission, May 2008; final acceptance, May 2008

Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

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468 Steinberg

mundo, impresos en Europa y las Americas entre 1501 y 1800, este artıculo traza la construccion del oceanocomo un espacio exterior de movilidad, antitetico de la norma del estado territorial que tambien estabaemergiendo durante esta epoca. Palabras clave: historia de la cartograf ıa, movilidad, oc´ eano, territorialidad delestado.

The function of a boundary is to produce and regulatea distinction between inside and outside; the movement

of things across a boundary signals not its failure but itssuccess.

—Rubenstein (2001, 289)

When borders gain a paradoxical centrality, margins,

edges, and lines of communication emerge as complexmaps and histories.

—Clifford (1997, 7)

Is it not odd that ours, the most nomadic and migratory of cultures, should found its polity, its psychology, its ethicsand even its poetics on the antithesis of movement: on

the rhetoric of foundations, continuity, genealogy, stasis?—Carter (1996, 2–3)

We are the only people in the world who use seafaringinstruments to determine our position on the ground.

—Bohannan (1964, 175)

This article is an attempt to explain an apparentparadox of modern territoriality. On the onehand, the concept of territoryhas a foundational

role in the structure of modern society. According toconventional narratives of state territoriality, inhabit-

able land is divided into autonomous, sovereign unitsthat ostensibly form the fundamental basis for one’s cit-izenship and identity. Each of these territories, in turn,is controlled by a government that secures its bound-aries, plots the land within, organizes it, and coordinatesthe production of value from its human and natural re-sources (Gottman 1973). Geographers who have stud-ied the history of territoriality stress that this equationof social space (and individual identity) with boundedterritoryis a distinctly“modern” conception (Soja 1971;Sack 1986).

On the other hand, even as the territorial state was

becoming the normative social institution, these ter-ritorially defined social units were turning away fromspatially fixed, terrestrial homeplaces. Although schol-ars differ over precisely when the modern system of sovereign, territorial polities came into being, mostwould agree that the process was roughly concurrentwith the age of exploration and the era of merchantcapitalism that followed (ca. 1500–1800), an era that

was characterized not just by intensified territorializa-tion, but also by a revolution in transportation (Vance1990; Hugill 1993). The “discovery” of new lands tobound and govern was made possible only by the “dis-covery” of the ocean as a space of connection andan arena of mobility (Parry 1974; Biagini and Hoyle1999; Bender 2006). Indeed, during this era, Europe’sprevailing global image changed from one in whichthe world was viewed as an integrated landmass of discrete places, surrounded by a practically insignificantbordering ocean, to one in which boundable space waspushed to the margins as the world came to be perceivedas dominated by a world-ocean (or oceans) punctuated

by island-continents (Cosgrove 2001). In other words,even as the concept of boundable space (territory) wasbecoming essential for political organization, maritimespaces that resisted bounding were moving to the cen-ter of modern cosmology. Similarly, especially duringthe first half of this era, projections of power onto spacefocused on claiming rights of access to routes ratherthan direct control over swaths of overseas territory(Brotton 1998; Mancke 1999; Steinberg 1999a, 2001;Gillis 2007).

Linked with this historical paradox regarding the for-mation of the state system—that the territorial state

emerged concurrent with the deterritorialization of po-litical economy and the geographical imagination—are the paradoxes about the processes of territorialityin the contemporary world that are expressed in thequotations that began this article: We live in a worldin which we affirm borders by crossing them (Clifford1997; Rubenstein 2001); we construct myths of sta-ble societies defined by bounded territories by living ina world of movement outside those territories (Carter1996); and we establish the locational grounding for ourlives in those territories through techniques establishedfor moving across the putatively placeless sea (which,

in turn, make reference to another abstract space: thesky; Bohannan 1964). Each of these statements sug-gests the frailty of the binary oppositions embedded inthe sociospatial logic of the sovereign, territorial state:oppositions between inside and outside; between unitand system; between land and sea; between fixity andmovement; and between experienced place and rela-tive, abstract space.

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Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside 469

In an attempt to think through these parallel ten-dencies toward territorialization and deterritorializa-tion, this article is aligned with an ever-growingbody of work, across many disciplines, that attemptsto delink this modern equation between the uni-tary citizen-subject and the sovereign space of thestate-society by examining postmodern subjects whoinhabit positions “between” worlds.1 Much of this lit-erature, which roughly can be grouped under the rubricof critical borderland and migration studies, engagespoststructuralist-inspired geographic scholarship thatseeks to disrupt naturalized and historically stable con-ceptions of being, place, stasis, and locatedness in favorof ontologies of becoming, connection, mobility, andbetweenness.

Whereas some early works in this genre tendedtoward what Cresswell (2006) critiques as a cele-bratory “nomadic metaphysics,” more sophisticated,

empirically based studies generally have emphasizedthat individuals’ practices of mobility vary and are notnecessarily liberatory; the experience of the jetsetteris very different from that of the refugee (K. Mitchell1997; Ong 1998). Furthermore, these scholars assertthat one must draw a distinction between individu-als who engage in cultural mobility (e.g., postcolonialindividuals who occupy identity positions “between”worlds) and those who engage in geographical mobil-ity (e.g., refugees, migrants, members of diasporas, orborder crossers who physically move between worldsor occupy borderland locations). Not all physical acts

of movement involve the transgression of identity cat-egories, and, conversely, hybrid identities can emergein place. Indeed, it seems likely that the conflation of these two kinds of mobility facilitates short-sighted cel-ebrations of the “nomad” as an inherently liberatoryfigure.2

One reason these two forms of border crossing areso often conflated is that we see mobility against thenormative portrayal of the world as timelessly and nat-urally divided into bordered units: sovereign, territorialstates that define the scope of governance and nations.From such a perspective, any act of border crossing is

inherently disruptive. To achieve distance from thisnormative worldview, the aforementioned scholars of critical borderland and migration studies typically focuson individuals and communities that break the moldby living in, between, or across borders. Although I ambroadly sympathetic with this literature, in this articleI take a different approach: I argue that to place bordercrossing in context we need to first rethink the assumed

position of the sovereign, territorial state as the funda-mental sociogeographic entity the borders of which arebeing crossed. To do this, I seek to trace the history bywhich the sovereign state, as the idealized negation ofmobility, has been represented as the universal geopo-litical “reality.”

Tracing the history of the territorial state is hardly anoriginal project: The genesis of the modern, sovereign,territorial state has been well documented, as reviewedlater. The emergence of the modern state, however, isalmost always told as a history of constructing insides: ofdrawing boundary lines and governing the space within.Such a story inadvertently reproduces the modern no-tion of the bounded, homogenous, state-society unitthat is regularly critiqued by borderland and migrationscholars, even as it denaturalizes these sociospatial for-mations’ histories. In contrast, in this article I seek tonarrate the origin of the modern state ideal by trac-

ing the construction of its outsides. This project hasbeen taken up by many in the critical geopolitics move-ment (e.g., O Tuathail 1996; Campbell 1998; Sharp2001), but for these scholars the outside against whichthe discourse of the state as a naturally bounded en-tity is juxtaposed typically is the space of other peo-ples (whom statist discourses often represent as lesscivilized) or other states (which frequently are repre-sented as naturally antagonistic). These studies go along way toward explaining how an individual state’sideology is produced, but they fail to interrogate howthe normative discourse of the generic, idealized state

as an internal space with governance, unity, stasis,fixity, and society—the state idea (Abrams 1988; T.Mitchell 1999; Painter 2006)—is buttressed by its jux-taposition against an even more fundamental outside:an asocial world of disorder beyond the state system.Echoing Schmitt’s (2006a) argument that the powerof the individual sovereign is rooted in the sovereign’sability to exclude individuals from its protection (seealso Agamben 1998), I suggest that the rise of the con-cept of sovereignty historically was interwoven with thedesignation of certain spaces as beyond the sovereignstate’s organizational limits. In this article, follow-

ing a further elaboration of this perspective on stateterritoriality, sovereignty, and mobility, I sketch outthis alternative history of the modern state by tracingchanges in cartographic representations of the state sys-tem’s paradigmatic outside—the world-ocean—duringthe era when the territorial state was becomingformalized as a European, and subsequently global,norm.

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470 Steinberg

Territoriality and Sovereignty: Looking Inand Looking Out

To analyze the role of movement across and beyondborders in the ongoing construction of the modern statesystem, one first must discuss the core principles of thatsystem and its fundamental unit: the sovereign, terri-torial state. Although the concepts of sovereignty andterritoriality frequently are used interchangeably in dis-cussions of the modern polity, the two terms in factreflect different organizing principles that can exist in-dependent of each other. Territoriality (when appliedto the modern state) refers to the manner in whichthe definition of a society’s geographic limits, the orga-nization of its processes, and the control of its peopleare exercised through claims of authority over boundedswaths of land. A territorial state thus can exist in isola-tion; it is essentially an inward-looking entity. On the

outside of a territorial state might be a world of otherinward-looking states; a world of nonequivalent politi-cal (territorial or nonterritorial) entities over which theruler of the initial state might have some influence; anungoverned “wild”; or absolutely nothing (in the eventthat one state manages to encompass the entire planetwithin its territory; Kratochwil 1986). Thus, at the ab-stract level, the concept of state territoriality can existindependent of a state system.

By contrast, although sovereignty has existed eversince humans have asserted absolute authority withintheir realm, the modern state tempers this claim to

power with the recognition that it exists within a mu-tually exclusive system wherein other sovereigns havepower within their respective, formally equivalent en-tities. Thus, the modern institution of sovereignty isinherently a systemic condition in that it is impossibleto have a world of just one sovereign unit. Sovereigntycan persist only when multiple sovereigns recognizeeach other’s equivalency (the outward-looking aspectof sovereignty) as well as when the sovereign’s subjectsrecognize the sovereign’s authority (the inward-lookingaspect of sovereignty; Taylor 1994).

Sovereignty is not necessarily defined and delimited

territorially (one canthink,for instance,of religions andpolitical parties that recognize a world of equivalent,competing religions or parties, not divided territorially,but that countenance membership in only one religionor party). As Keohane states, “Rather than connot-ing the exercise of supremacy within a given territory,sovereignty provides the state with a legal grip on anaspect of a transnational process. . . . Sovereignty is lessa territorially defined barrier than a bargaining resource for

a politics characterized by complex transnational networks(Keohane 2002, 74,emphasis in original). Keohane’s as-sertion implies that the formation of the modern statewas a strategic innovation that occurred when insti-tutions that already had been using territoriality forpolitical power—itself a strategy with a very long his-tory dating to the origins of agriculture (Sack 1986)or the first premodern state (Mann 1984)—came toadopt the inward-looking and outward-looking aspectsof sovereignty.

Although the association of the modern, territorial,sovereign state with the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia isnow widely recognized as a historically inaccurate over-simplification (Krasner 1993; MacRae 2005), there islittle consensus among political theorists and historiansabout when precisely the modern state did emerge. Inlarge part, these disagreements stem from differing em-phases regarding the properties that are essential com-

ponents of the modern state. The earliest dates tend tobe from those who stress the functional-administrative (orinward-looking) aspect of state sovereignty. Strayer, forinstance, writes that in Europe as early as 1100 therewere signs of “political units persisting in time and fixedin space, the development of permanent, impersonalinstitutions, agreement on the need for an authoritywhich can give final judgments, and acceptance of theidea that this authority should receive the basic loy-alty of its subjects” (Strayer 1970, 10). He writes thatthese ideas and institutions had consolidated, at leastin England and France, by 1300. These relatively early

dates are shared by others who similarly deemphasizethe territorial nature of the modern state or its exis-tence within a system of sovereign states and insteadassociate sovereignty with the functional integration of a nation, unified by a singular authority (Armstrong1982; Hinsley 1986).

Others, who focus on the modern state less as afunctional-administrative unit than as a territorial unit,date its origins somewhat later. A number of schol-ars who have studied national boundary lines on mapsprior to the mid-sixteenth century assert that, insteadof defining the geographic limits of the state, these lines

merely served as imprecise indicators of zones of influ-ence, to the extent that they signified political powerat all. This meaning was exemplified by the lack of a hierarchical differentiation between the lines sepa-rating national units from those separating provincesand other subnational territories. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, however, borderlines began to takeon a new level of meaning on maps as they strove toaccurately represent national boundaries on land. By

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the eighteenth century, state boundary lines typicallywere being highlighted to differentiate them from lesserlines of division, as the domain of state authority andits very identity came to be defined by its territorial lim-its (Sahlins 1989; Akerman 1995; Black 1997; Brotton1998; Biggs 1999; Kamen 2000; B. Anderson 2006),3

although some argue that the true integration of thestate as a territorial unit did not occur until the mid-nineteenth century (Maier 2000).

A third group of scholars emphasizes the systemic (oroutward-looking) aspect of the modern sovereign state.Tilly (1975), for instance, asserts that the proto-stateformations identified by Strayer could have developedin any of four directions: a political federation (as in theHoly Roman Empire), a theocratic federation (as in thePapacy), an intensive trading network of locality-basedpolities without any large-scale central organization (asin the world of medieval city-states), or a continuation

of the feudal organization of weak kings and scatteredfiefdoms with complex relations of fealty to the kingthat predominated in most of Europe in the thirteenthcentury. In the end, due to a series of contingent fac-tors that prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-turies, Europe went in a fifth direction, characterizedby a series of formally equivalent, territorially defined,mutually exclusive sovereignties characterized by “ter-ritorial consolidation, centralization, differentiation of the instruments of government from other sorts of or-ganization, and monopolization (plus concentration) of the means of coercion” (Tilly 1975, 27). As with schol-

ars who stress the territorial nature of the modern state,those who equate the modern state with the rise of a sys-tem of mutually exclusive sovereignties with centralizedpowers tend to date the modern state’s origin to some-where between 1500 and 1800 (Ruggie 1983; Krasner1993; Spruyt 1994; M. Anderson 1996), although thereare those who contend that this system did not con-solidate until the mid-nineteenth century (Thomson1994).

Territoriality and the Organization

of Space

This brief review of the literature on the origins of thestate reveals that the modern state unites the inward-looking aspect of sovereignty (as occurs when a nationis unified by a single, recognized sovereign), territo-riality (as occurs when the bounding and control of space is used to define the scope of a sovereign’s ruleand the identity of the sovereign’s subjects), and the

outward-looking aspect of sovereignty (as occurs whensovereigns recognize each other as rulers of mutuallyexclusive, functionally equivalent domains in which nononstate actor has similar standing). When these threeaspects of the modern state are combined, it becomesapparent that territorial state sovereignty is associatednotmerely with sovereigncontrol of theterritorywithinits borders but also with the overriding spatial logic thatcharacterizes modern society and that constructs spaceas a patchwork of mutually exclusive, bounded enti-ties (Ruggie 1993). In short, territoriality encompassesnot just the bounding of space but also its organization,within, across, and outside state borders.

A number of scholars have developed this theme,generally building on Foucault’s (2007) concept ofgovernmentality and Lefebvre’s (1991) and deCerteau’s (1991) emphasis on the role that abstractionplays in the spatial practices of those who seek to decen-

ter the places of everyday life and impart a hierarchical,functionalist socio-spatial logic. These scholars stressthat the attitude toward space reflected in the process ofbounding national territories is reproduced in internalterritorial organization, and that this internal territorialorganization constructs not just the state but the veryspace on which it is situated and through which it ob-tains its identity. The rationalization and abstraction ofspace embodied in the act of territorial bounding per-mits a discourse premised on control and management,which in turn both reflects and enables the exercise ofpower by those who, through control of territory, or-

ganize the social processes that transpire within. TheCartesian grid is constructed as a backdrop of abstractspace on which is located physical matter with objec-tive properties of extension (dimension, figure, weight,motion, and—most important—position). Due to thisconceptual separation between the objective materialworld (res extensa) and the subjective sensed world (rescogitans), the difference and distance between points inres extensa can be calculated and, once space has beenreduced to a mathematical abstraction, it follows thatit can be bounded into territories and managed (Elden2006).

As Sack (1986) notes, at an advanced stage of terri-toriality, space is viewed so abstractly that it becomes“conceptually emptiable” (and fillable) by an author-ity looking down from above. Combining Sack’s im-age with Giddens’s (1985) depiction of the state asa power container, the territorial state can be con-ceived of as a container that can be emptied and filled,and the contents of which can be rearranged acrossits points in space. From this perspective, places are

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472 Steinberg

perceivedof as distinct, but relative,points on the globalgrid that achieve social character as groups of peopletransform their local nature. Eventually, these soci-eties evolve into states that are “filled in” and “devel-oped” through the location of production activities atfixed points within these state-areas (Bohannan 1964;Soja 1971, 1980; Burch 1994; Steinberg and McDowell2003).

A key concept here, as stressed by Sahlins (1989), isthat the rise of the territorial state is characterized notsimply by the construction of its bounded territory asa homogenous administrative zone (as Sahlins chargesthat Allies [1980] and Gottman [1973] emphasize), butthat the territorial state constructs its space as a differ-entiated set of points that are amenable to being plotted(and thus manipulated and rationalized) against an ab-stract spatial grid (see also T. Mitchell 1991). Histori-cally, the development of technologies and institutions

for performing cadastral mapping and land surveyingstand out as mechanisms through which the state hasachieved a “bird’s-eye” view over territory as a meanstoward achieving social control over people (Bohannan1964; Kain and Baigent 1992; Vandergeest and Peluso1995; Edney 1997; Scott 1998; Biggs 1999). Thus, Biggs(1999) locates the origins of the territorial state in na-tional surveying efforts of the seventeenth century. Assurveyors mapped royal domains, they graphically notedeach village’s affiliation. What had been thought of asa personal relationship came to be expressed as a ter-ritorial relationship, and, at the same time, surveyors

imposed a grid of abstract space over the domain tofacilitate mapping. Eventually, these two phenomenaassociated with surveying converged in an example of what Pickles (2003) calls “overcoding”: The abstract,geometric space of the map came to define the lived-in space of the state, and the territorial relationshipbetween land and sovereign came to be seen as predi-cating the personal relationship between individual andsovereign. Other scholars have further illustrated there-lationship between the way that we hierarchically mapspace and the way that we hierarchically organize so-cial relationships. Knowledge of space is a crucial tool

for control, and the technologies of mapping (and theunderlying assumptions about society and space that en-ablemodern mapping), joined with hierarchical systemsfor drawing lines and assigning names, play a crucial rolein constructing instruments of sovereign domination(Akerman 1984, 1995; Carter 1987; Buisseret 1992;Ryan 1996; Edney 1997; Brotton 1998; Burnett 2000;Craib 2000; Hakli 2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2003;

Jacob 2006).4

In short, these scholars emphasize the key role thatthe ordering of space plays in the construction of stateterritoriality. This is an important advance over aperspective that simply looks at the bounding of space,but, as Strandsbjerg (2008) notes, these scholars of thecartographic origins of modern state sovereignty stilltend to analyze the state as an isolated unit. Given thatthe modern institution of sovereignty necessarily existswithin a system of sovereign units, a study of the modernstate (or a story of its origins) that works only from theperspective of the inward-looking aspect of sovereigntycannot be complete. As Taylor (1995) asserts, the start-ing point of political geography (and political history)must be a theory of the states rather than a theory of thestate. In a similar vein, geographies and histories of ter-ritoriality (or the ordering of space) must examine notjust the “emptiable” and “fillable” space constructed in-side the territories of sovereign states but also the spaces

on theoutside that aredesignated as notbeingamenableto this organization of space. Otherwise, any study of state territoriality risks falling into the “territorial trap”wherein states are viewed as internally coherent units,existing ontologically prior to the overall ordering of the state system, and wherein cross-border processescan be viewed only as “international relations” amongthese preexisting states (Agnew 1994; see also Sparke2005).

I am asserting here that the same “mapping” of spacethat permits (and is expressed by) the surveying of a na-tional border to define an inside also defines an outside

by making possible the conceptualization of a world of equivalent states existing next to each other in relativespace. Indeed, for Walker (1993) and Bartelson (1995),the discursive and material division of the world intoinsides and outsides is perhaps the fundamental act of sovereignty. The outside is not simply the residual spaceremaining after declaring an inside. If that is the pre-vailing image of the outside, it is an image that is itself constructed in tandem with the construction of a par-ticular image of the inside. For instance, the discourse of “containment” that prevailed during the Cold War wasbased on the idea of the state as a container set against

a potentially threatening environment, even thoughthis environment (or outside) was itself the territory of other sovereignstates that were constructingsimilar dis-courses about themselves and their neighbors (Chilton1996). Similarly, throughout the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries, the dominant image of the ocean asan “outside” beyond the universe of state-civilizationsprovided a pretext for banning all social actors oper-ating from this outside space. Yet this representation

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of the ocean was itself a construction of, and within,a system: The idealization of the ocean as the ultimateoutside, beyond civilization, bolstered the constructionof the rest of the world—the universe of territorialstates—as sovereign insides (Thomson 1994; Steinberg2001).

At the global scale, this division of the worldinto “insides” that matter and “outsides” that serveto facilitate development of the “insides” typically isachieved through reference to geophysical properties.In particular, the division of the world into fundamen-tal elements—land and sea—is viewed as the originaryact of the modern socio-spatial order (Schmitt 2006b).Connery thus directs attention specifically to chang-ing representations of the sea as a means toward un-derstanding the political division and appropriation of land: “The triumph of a particular oceanic significationis coterminous with the universalization of land con-

cepts, a signification that, thanks to the liquid elementitself, leaves no borders, furrows, or markings” (Connery2001, 177).

Constructing Outsides ThroughMovement

The concentration on the construction of insidesthat permeates most studies of territoriality is paralleledby a concentration on processes of spatial fixity. Moststudies of societal development are informed by a per-spective that locates the essence of society in spatially

fixed activities that occur within bounded society-stateterritories:

Spatially fixed acts of production and consumption thatoccur within a static state territory are taken as the es-

sential acts of society and therefore the basis of “political”state power. Other economic activities—those that takeplace outside state territory, those that involve trade, orthose that more broadly concern capital mobility—maybe engaged in if they are deemed supportive of the essen-tial polity-building activities, but neorealist and neoliberal[international relations scholars] agree that states will re-frain from these subordinate activities if they are found

detrimental to the state’s primary political objective of maintaining authority over territory. (Steinberg and Mc-

Dowell 2003, 207)

Burch (1994) similarly asserts that the modern statesystem rests on a manufactured distinction (which hadnot existed prior to 1700) between a political arenacharacterized by spatially fixed, tangible property andan economic arena characterized by mobile, intangibleproperty.

If indeed the modern system of territorialsovereignty—with its binary distinction between in-sides and outsides—rests on a discursive constructionof fixity as the domain of the political and mobility asthe domain of the economic, then a good place to be-gin deconstructing the distinction between inside andoutside might be through an investigation of the (hid-den) role of mobility in the construction of the po-litical. For Virilio (1986, 1997), the role of mobilityin contemporary politics is anything but hidden. In aperhaps overly literal interpretation of Marx’s apho-rism about the “annihilation of space with time” (Marx1973, 539), Virilio asserts that information, munitions,currency, and other vehicles of power now travel atsuch speeds that the boundaries that historically hadsegmented political territories—and the Cartesian gridon which this segmentation had been based—are nolonger relevant. Cultural theorists similarly stress that

the communities that historically have been defined bythese bounded territories are being replaced by a newsystem of “translocality” (Appadurai 1996b) or “trav-eling cultures” (Clifford 1997), in which identities areformed through connections across space rather thanrootedness in place.

Whereas Virilio, Appadurai, and (to a lesser extent)Clifford stress the victory of mobility as a postmodernevent, others stress the role of mobility in the construc-tion of modernity. For Latour (1986, 1987) and Law(1986), the development of standardized proceduresfor moving information across space permitted the

combining of information and the replication of themeans by which this information was gathered, and thisinnovation in mobility was the key that gave European unprecedented advantage in the accumulationof knowledge at the center and the projection ofknowledge outward as power. Cartographic theoristssimilarly have noted how the projection of geographicimages onto an abstract grid of relative space createdthe illusion of a decentered—and hence objective—world of geometry, independent from that of socialhierarchy and political power, and that this facilitatedthe cooptation, combination, and manipulation of

local knowledges so as to enable the universalizationof understandings (Turnbull 1989, 1996; Woodward1990; Mignolo 1995).5

Although there are significant differences amongthese scholars (most notably regarding whether the roleof mobility in constituting identities and state power is amodern or postmodern phenomenon), they all suggestthat we turn our attention toward practices and rep-resentations of mobility if we want to avoid Agnew’s

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474 Steinberg

“territorial trap” wherein the inside of the territorialstate is assumed to be a timeless fundamental sociopo-litical entity. Put another way, the ordering of spaceand the projection of power across space is associatedwith the drawing of lines of movement (which can crossboundary lines) as well as with the drawing of boundarylines (that purport to restrict movement). This is a cen-tral point of Albert (1999), who, expanding on Deleuzeand Guattari’s (1988) concept of reterritorialization,writes:

Sovereignty is something that has to be practised through“marking” space by boundaries of various kinds—and bymapping these boundaries in an exact science. . . . For ter-ritory to be meaningful it has to be reproduced by theenactment of challenges to it, by questionings and era-sures of boundaries as markers of space, but also throughthe inscription of new boundaries. (Albert 1999, 61)

In other words, through the marking and crossing of boundary lines, one defines not merely the scope of what is inside the territorial unit but also the natureof the system itself, as the system is represented as beingthe sum of its bounded units.

Deleuze and Guattari’s insights regarding the contin-uing function of reterritorialization through boundarydrawing and boundary crossing are important becausethey suggest that the relationship between mobility andfixity is more complex than simply a contradiction be-tween a political desire to capture and enclose and aneconomic desire to open borders.6 Indeed, they make

possible a wholesale reconceptualizationof the relation-ship between state and territory, wherein the world isunderstood as a decentered “empire,” characterized bynetworks of power that continually deterritorialize andreterritorialize (Hardt and Negri 2001). At the root of this reconceptualization of power is a heightened un-derstanding of the social significance of movement inthe constitution of space: “Space is composed of inter-sections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuatedby the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (deCerteau 1991, 117). Hence, movement produces poli-tics (and states) as well as challenging them.

This perspective on the hidden roles of movement,the crossing of boundaries, and the definition of out-sides in the inscription of territorial states is evident inBurnett’s (2000) study of the surveying of Guyana, inwhich he highlights the role of the traverse surveyorwho works by moving across boundaries, even as his orher stated end is the defining of an inside space of fix-ity with supposedly inviolable boundary lines. It is alsoevident in Salter’s (2003) genealogy of the global pass-

port regime, wherein the construction of these “path-ways” to the “outside” contributed to the constructionof the boundaries across which individuals were passingand the “insides” from which they were leaving. It isevident, perhaps most clearly, in Carter’s (1996) callfor sociocartographic studies in which foreground andbackground are reversed, where the emphasis is placedon tracing the lines of movement as “drift-lanes” (asopposed to mere routes between places) on a texturedground, rather than on the boundary lines that (pur-portedly) divide abstract, empty space into discrete ter-ritorial units.

Mapping Movement

It is easy to issue calls for recognizing mobility as con-stitutive of society, but putting this recognition intopractice is much more difficult, in large part because

mobility elides representation: “[Mobility] is absent themoment we reflect on it. It has passed us by” (Cresswell2006, 57). When movement is mapped onto Euclideanspace, the processes of movement, wherein people en-gage and produce space in their everyday lives as theydraw and cross borders, are replaced by static represen-tations. As summarized by Burnett:

Carter points out that the flattening of the land into a mapturned walking the land from a way of living into littlemore than a symbol. The peripateia of one foot following

another across the contours of the terrain became merelya line on the map. Instead of being an exploration—an

active engagementwith place—the passage became a fixedinscription:the place becamea stage.The dialoguesof footand ground, light and eye, breath and breeze all vanished,and with them the territorial claims of wanderers andnomads, those whose relationship with place was rootedin participation (methexis), not representation (mimesis).(Burnett 2000, 171)

De Certeau elaborates on this point in his critique of route maps:

It istruethat the operations ofwalking on can be traced oncity maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here

well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (go-ing this way and not that). But these thick or thin curvesonly refer, like words, to the absence of what has passedby. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of pass-ing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or “windowshopping,” that, the activity of passers-by, is transformed

into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on themap. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhenof a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effectof making invisible the operation that made it possible.

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These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. Thetrace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibitsthe (voracious) property that the geographical system hasof being able to transform action into legibility, but in do-ing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.(de Certeau 1991, 97)

An extreme example of the failure ofthe route map toconvey methexis can be seen in portolan charts, whichbegan to be produced in the late thirteenth centuryto accompany portolans, lists of directional headingsand distances between communities along the coaststhat were frequented by Mediterranean sailors. On aportolan chart, the ocean—the space of movement—is crisscrossed by rhumb lines punctuated by compassroses, which could be used by sailors to find the head-ing that would get them from a port on one coast toa port on the opposite coast. Although it is debatable

whether portolan charts ever saw much use as navi-gational aids, the persistence of rhumb lines on mapsthrough the seventeenth century (when they certainlywere not being used for navigation), as well as their ap-pearance on world maps (where, for technical reasons,they cannot aid navigation), suggests that rhumb lineswere important because they symbolized the idea of theocean as a space that could be easily crossed (Steinberg2005; Jacob 2006). Indeed, the prevalence of rhumblines on seventeenth-century world maps that used theMercator projection (which, in turn, was derived fromthe mathematical logic of the portolan chart; Williams

1992) further suggests that rhumb lines served less toenable navigation than they did to signify the prac-tice of navigation and, by extension, the navigability of space.

Portolan charts were maps of idealized movement.In their depiction of an ocean crossed with rhumblines, portolan charts were prefiguratively modern. Theocean was portrayed as an idealized space of limitlessmobility (one simply needed to set one’s heading andskirt around the highlighted intervening islands). Yetthis representation signified nothing about the experi-ence of moving through what de Certeau calls “prac-

ticed space”: the space that time makes (Casey 2002;Steinberg 2005).

When one looks at the ocean on a portolan chart,one is struck by the fact that, for maps that were in-tended to be used at sea (or to resonate with the imageof crossing the sea), the sea is exceptionally empty.Although Ptolemaic maps, especially in the fifteenthcentury (see later), featured numerous names for bays,gulfs, seas, and oceans, these toponyms almost never

appear on portolan charts, even on large-scale mapsin portolan atlases where there would have been am-ple room for their placement. Similarly, one finds few,if any, sea monsters, fish, ships, or other indicatorsof human or nonhuman life on the sea that mightevoke the experience of the sailor moving through a ma-rine environment. Rather, the portolan chart idealizesthe act of moving along a straight route, through emptyspace. Although portolan charts are “route-enhancing”maps that foreground the act of (or at least the poten-tial for) maritime movement (Woodward 1990), themovement that is represented is a disembodied processthat abstracts movement from time, environment, orhuman experience. As frequently occurs when the actof wayfinding is depicted cartographically, the experi-ential aspect of movement disappears and the map losesits utility as a functional tool (Akerman 2006; Delano-Smith 2006).

The limits of the cartographic representation ofmovement (whether on a portolan chart or a mod-ern route map) are given dramatic effect by geographer-artist Matthew Knutzen (2000) in his work Subway Map(Figure 1), in which he reproduces the New York Citysubway map but with all the route lines omitted. By itsstark reduction of routes to abstracted, nonlinear sym-bols, Subway Map spurs the viewer to consider how allsubway maps (and other route maps) are, in de Certeau’swords, “procedures of forgetting” rather than represen-tations of the experience of movement.

At the root of the critique leveled by Knutzen (and

by Burnett, Carter, and de Certeau) is the problem thatmovement involves travel through time as well as spaceand, as Massey (2005) and Grosz (1995) have shown,the coconstitution of space and time is incompatiblewith the concept of representation. So long as the worldis conceived of as a set of stable points, on which andacross which objects emerge and subsequently move,the distinction between a contextual, stable backgroundof space and a dynamic, mobile foreground of time willpersist, leading to incomplete depictions of mobility asa foundational social process (Elden 2005).

An alternative would be to map the experience of

movement through time. In addition to various non-Western maps that depict movement through time(Harley, Woodward, and Lewis 1992–1998), this repre-sentation of movement can be seen in medieval map-paemundi that “reveal explicitly the layers of historicalevents, processes, and artifacts that have shaped thepresent landscape, as well as the objects that nowexist . . . portray[ing] the location and distribution notonly of objects and conditions but also of events and

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476 Steinberg

Figure 1. “Subway Map” by Matthew

Knutzen (2000). Image courtesy of theartist.

processes” (Woodward 1985, 519–20). This depictioncontrasts with the modern map, where “the elementof time, so important in the mappamundi, disappear[s]

in favor of a world in the present tense” (Edson 2007,14).

De Certeau praises mappaemundi for the way thatthey capture the experience of movement: “an out-line marked out by footprints with regular gaps betweenthem and by pictures of the successive events that tookplace in the course of the journey . . . not a ‘geograph-ical map’ but ‘history book’” (de Certeau 1991, 120;see also Woodward 1985, 1987b). Although a map-

pamundi might be more “accurate” than the modernmap in capturing the experience of movement throughtime, it is no better (and probably worse) at capturing

movement through spaces that, even if they are dy-namically produced, always exist in relation to otherspaces.7 The potentials and limits of this position areexemplified by another piece of conceptual art basedon the New York City subway map, Hand-held Subway,by Nina Katchadourian (Figure 2). In an apparent in-vocation of Deleuze’s statement (after Bergson) that“movement is no less outside me than in me” (Deleuze1988, 75), Katchadourian (1996) has cut out the routes

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from the subway map and reconstituted them withinher hand, leaving the viewer wondering whether, whenone moves, one’s body moves along routes (that are setagainst a fixed background of space) or whether routesmove through one’s body (as a collage of images, ex-periences, and memories that flash through one’s brainas one moves through time). Thus, Katchadourian il-lustrates Deleuze’s concept wherein “our perceptioncontracts ‘an incalculable multitude of rememorializedelements’; at each instant, our present infinitely con-tracts our past” (Deleuze 1988, 74). As Massey (2005)notes, however, Deleuze’s conceptualization falls shortbecause, although the “here and now” of the self is con-stituted through the accumulated memories and im-ages of passage through time, it is equally constitutedthrough the accumulation of passages through space.Hence, although Katchadourian’s artwork is to be com-mended for leading the viewer to consider the methexis

of mobility, it fails to fully capture the practice because

Figure 2. “Hand-held Subway” by Nina Katchadourian (1996).

Image courtesy of the artist and Sara Meltzer gallery.

mobility involves movement through space as well astime.

Ptolemy and the “Transport Revolution”

By the sixteenth century, as Europe’s “transport revo-lution” was commencing and the ideal of the sovereign,territorial state was beginning to congeal, both the por-tolan chart and the mappamundi were giving way to sys-tems of geographic representation based on the griddedspace of the Ptolemaic map. By introducing the conceptof a grid for plotting points against an ideal of Euclideanspace, the “discovery” of Ptolemy’s Geography and itsinitial European publication in 1409 revolutionized Eu-ropean cartography. These innovations followed fromPtolemy’s application of an “astronomer’s vision” to amapping of the world (Cosgrove 2001, 105). By looking

up at the stars, one could locate oneself on an abstractgrid. Using the grid, one could plot a world ofrelative lo-cations on Earth’s surface. This system of plotted pointsthen could be used to construct a tableau of static loca-tions for mapping natural and social features. The effectwas to replace the “center-enhancing” perspective ofthe mappamundi with an “equipollent-coordinate” per-spective, “entirely geometrical and abstract, indepen-dent of the geographical content beneath” (Woodward1990, 119). Although the details of Ptolemy’s Geogra-

phy were soon surpassed by the findings of contemporaryexplorers, the equipollent-coordinate logic underlying

his method continues to inform cartographic practice,even if it shares the stage with other spatial logics ineveryday practice (Curry 2005).

Throughout this era, world maps inspired by Ptolemymade little attempt to represent movement and hencethere was little depiction of the boundary lines, forgedand reproduced through movement, that divided theterrestrial inside space of land, society, state, andsovereign from the marine outside beyond. This wasin contrast with mappaemundi and portolan charts,which each came to produce elemental distinctionsbetween land and sea, albeit in very different ways,

as they sought to represent the process of movement.Mappaemundi sought to depict journeys through time,and these were believed to occur on land, because,as Aristotle noted, “The sea surrounds the earth likethe horizon, and ships cannot work in this sea . . . andnobody has crossed it, and it is unknown where itends” (cited in Johnson 1994, 38). Thus the ocean wasconstructed as an uncrossed, unnamed, and unmappedoutside, a “phantasmic . . . ring which was above all a

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mental ring, a psychological barrier” (Biagini and Hoyle1993, 3). Conversely, portolan charts foregrounded theocean, the space of the mobile practice being repre-sented on these maps. In many cases, rhumb lines endedwhen they reached the coast. Mirroring the ocean onmappaemundi, land areas on portolan charts (beyondthe coastal points where ocean routes terminated) wereexternal spaces, “vague areas inside the border—butbeyond the contour of the map” (Jacob 2006, 111).

On early Ptolemaic charts, however, with their con-ception of the world as a field of equivalent points,there was no such distinction between a foregrounded“inside” and a backgrounded “outside” and no bound-ary lines that attempted to communicate a division be-tween purported zones of movement and stasis. Rather,early Ptolemaic maps recognized a fundamental similar-ity between the earthly elements of land and sea. Re-gions on Ptolemaic maps simply were labels for clusters

of points in space rather than designations of distinctand relevant social (or sociopolitical) units (Akerman1984), and “in Ptolemy the lines [were] reduced tothe status of markers on a surface of infinite variation”(Curry 2005, 685).

Set against the ideal of points-in-space located ona fixed grid (which could be laid across Earth’s sur-face by looking to the sky), the distinction betweenland and sea, which had been so important on themappamundi and the portolan chart, was greatly di-minished. For Ptolemy (and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cartographers working in his tradition), the

ocean was a field of points that could be mapped andnamed just like land (Lewis 1999). Thus, whereas theocean had few if any regional names on mappaemundior portolan charts, world maps in early printed edi-tions of Ptolemy’s Geography were replete with namesfor oceans, seas, gulfs, and bays (and even more oceannames appeared on the accompanying regional maps;Table 1).8

These maps’ turn away from the land–sea distinctionthat implicitly had underlain mappaemundi and por-tolan charts also can be seen in the way in which theyused a combination of land-space and ocean-space tomark the margins of the known world (Dilke 1987).In contrast with mappaemundi, where knowable landwas encircled by an unknowable ocean, or portolancharts, where a knowable (or, to be more precise, nav-igable) ocean was surrounded by unnavigable land, ona Ptolemaic map, all points in space were knowable

(and amenable to toponyms), all were plottable, and allexisted in relation to each other.Thus, the Ptolemaic map presents a perspective

wherein all points in space are equivalent and rela-tive. Although this might seem to establish the con-text for a world without discontinuous categories (e.g.,the binary between land and ocean), in fact, as Fou-cault (1973) has shown, equivalence makes calculation,and hence comparison, possible (Elden 2006; Steinberg2006). The comparison of like units finds cartographicexpression in the depiction of stable, homogenous en-tities demarcated by fixed boundaries, as in a map of

Table 1. Number of names for ocean regions on Ptolemaic world maps in printed copies of Ptolemy’s Geography, 1478–1730

Ptolemy Series (based on

review of 47 printed copies of

The Geography in the Newberry

Library’s Henry Stevens Collection)

Names in outer

seas (Atlantic/

Indian/North)

Names in inner

seas (Mediterranean/

Black/Caspian)

Total ocean

region

names

Rome 1478 (reprinted in Rome 1490, 1507, 1508) 26 17 43

Rome 1480 29 21 50

Ulm 1482 (reprinted in Ulm 1486) 19 10 29

Venice 1511 17 14 31

Strassburg 1513 (reprinted in Strassburg 1520) 18 15 33

Strassburg 1522 (reprinted in Strassburg 1525; Lyons 1535; Vienna1541)

12 2 14

Basle 1540 (reprinted in Basle 1542, 1545, 1552) 8 3 11

Venice 1561 (reprinted in Venice 1562, 1564a, 1564b) 9 3 12

Venice 1574 (reprinted in Venice 1598a, 1599) 9 3 12

Cologne 1578 (reprinted in Cologne 1584; Amsterdam/Frankfurt

1605; Amsterdam 1618; Frankfurt/Amsterdam 1695, 1698, 1704;

Amsterdam 1730)

8 3 11

Venice 1596 (reprinted in Cologne/Arnheim 1597; Venice 1598b;

Cologne 1608; Arnheim 1617; Padua 1621)

9 2 11

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political units or land-use management areas wherethe complexities of boundary crossing and boundaryformation are obscured by the illusion of permanence(Harris and Hazen 2006; Harvey 2006). Such a map,which resonates with the medieval (or Platonic) depic-tion of the island polis (Gillis 2004; Steinberg 2005),implies that there are absolute and immutable distinc-tions between territorial insides (the land-space of statesocieties that are idealized as arenas of sedentarism, civ-ilization, and development) and outsides (most notablythe marine wild, which is idealized as a space of mobil-ity devoid of natural or social forces that might hindermobility).

In other words, the Ptolemaic map presented a worldof points without lines, a representation that stood incontrast to many other maps of the era that impliedfixed and elemental distinctions between categoriesof space. At the same time, though, by depicting the

world as a set of relative points—a res extensa amenableto calculation—it established the basis for the mod-ern map that depicts absolute distinctions betweeninsides and outsides. To trace the evolution of themodern map from one that depicted a world of equiva-lent points to one that depicted a world of differen-tiated bounded spaces, the remainder of this articlechronicles the cartographic construction of the ulti-mate outside—the asocial marine void—from 1500 to1800.

On Analyzing What Is Not There

At this point, one is faced with a methodologicaldilemma. If, as Cresswell (2006) notes, mobility elidesrepresentation, then spaces of mobility are similarly dif-ficult to represent, at least when mobility is idealized asa process that occurs beyond experience and abstractedfrom time, as in the subway map or the portolan chart.When mobility is conceived in this manner, the sur-faces across which one moves are valued because theyare (ideally) devoid of features and hence amenable toannihilation. If one’s aim is to historicallytrace the evo-

lution of the representation of the ocean as an empty,external space (as a counterpoint to the evolution of the representation of terrestrial states as bounded andsovereign), how does one record the development of something that is increasingly represented (or nonrep-resented) as absent? There is no “there” in mobility (orits spaces) to be represented.

This dilemma is moot if one accepts the argu-ment that mapsare fundamentallynonrepresentational.

Kitchin and Dodge (2007) suggest that we move be-yond semiosis and view maps not as stable entities thatcode the world through representation but rather asprocesses that are enacted (or performed) through userengagement, a perspective that resonates with a broadertrend in social theory toward appreciating the fluidityof objects (Law 2002). Although Kitchin and Dodgemight well be correct in pointing to the instability of amap’s meaning and hence in identifying the map as anonrepresentational object, it nonetheless remains thecase that maps have achieved much of their power by

purporting to represent. Although the representationssuggested by maps are anything but stable (the iden-tities of consumers, producers, maps, and the referredspaces all are transformed in multiple ways in the pro-cess of “performing” a map; Brown and Knopp 2008),maps nonetheless achieve their power through repre-sentations, as map producers and users engage a web

of representational conventions and preexisting con-ceptualizations to give meaning to the dots, lines, andshadings inscribed as cartographic text (Hanna et al.2004; Del Casino and Hanna 2006).

It follows that the appropriate critical response mightbe not to turn away from semiotics but to turn towarda nuanced semiotics that recognizes the particular waysin which a map claims authority. Indeed, Jacob’s (2006)study of cartographic semiotics suggests that maps areparticularly powerful when representing a process thatis difficult to represent (in this case, movement) or aspace that similarly defies representation (in this case,

theocean). Thus a study of cartographicrepresentationswould seem to be especially fruitful for understandingthe links between the construction of the ocean as anexternal space of mobility and the concomitant con-struction of a global political system of sovereign, terri-torial states.

Jacob notes that the standard semiotic triad of sig-nifier (the symbol in question), signified (the idea towhich the signifier refers), and referent (the materialreality that the signifier represents) does not hold formaps. Whereas the authority of most signifiers is de-rived from their link (or at least their perceived link)

with a referent, a map has a special claim to author-ity because it cannot be verified. Unlike, for instance,a photograph, a map does not claim to bear any re-semblance to the thing that it represents: “The map’slink to its referent is clearly different from the mimesisthat belongs to images in general. . . . Maps are basedupon a collective consensus and an individual accordthat grounds their validity, their accuracy, no doubtfor lack of a capacity to measure resemblance because

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of an inaccessible referent” (Jacob 2006, 272).9 Jacob’sstatement about the inaccessibility of the referent isparticularly true in the case of a world map, where thereferent is at a scale entirely beyond the realm of humanexperience.

The semiotics of the map is further complicated for

Jacob because, in addition to having no direct corre-spondence with a referent, the signifier is also obscured:“An effective map is transparent because it is a sig-nified without a signifier. [The signifier] vanishes inthe visual and intellectual operation that unfolds itscontent. . . . The map is not an object but a function”(Jacob 2006, 11). A map thus achieves its authority notwhen it is found to approximate reality but rather whenit becomes something that one uses un-self-consciously,as a proxy for reality. In this manner, a map begins to in-sinuate itself as reality (see also Crampton 2003; Pickles2003).

Just as Jacob’s statement about the lack of verifiablecorrespondence between a map and its referent is par-ticularly true for world maps, his statement about thelack of evident correspondence between a map and itssignified is particularly true for maps that attempt todepict spaces or processes of movement. Because mapsare rarely useful as way-finding tools (Akerman 2006;Delano-Smith 2006; this is especially so in the case of aworld map; Cosgrove2001),a map’s depictionof a spaceof movement is less a signifying tool for movement andmore an expression of an idea about the ease (or lackof ease) of mobility, as well as a means by which the

viewer of the map idealizes herself or himself as a “lo-cated” subject who is associated with a bounded spacebut who maintains the ability to move across space(Conley 1996). Thus, for instance, a rhumb line shouldbe considered as a representation of the idea that theocean can be crossed rather than a tool that enablesits crossing (and, again, this is especially so in the caseof a world map, where rhumb lines are not functional;Steinberg 2005). Likewise, a line on a transit system’sroute map suggests the idea of friction-free movementbeyond time rather than representing the actual expe-rience of travel.

Of course, if a map is a projection of an idea thenthe question arises: Whose idea is being projected ontothe map? Every map involves some fusion of the cartog-rapher’s personal preference and the commonly heldconventions and perspectives of the intended reader-ship. As one analyzes maps, there is always the danger,in extrapolating from individual maps to social normsand attitudes, that any particular map represents the at-titude of the cartographer (or the cartographer’s patron)

rather than a social norm. To diminish this possibility,the analysis discussed next, in addition to using a verylarge data set, is restricted to printed maps, where car-tographers typically feel a greater pressure to conformto contemporary norms about the world and its spacesthan they do when producing manuscript maps (Jacob2006).

In addition, the data set analyzed here is restrictedto world maps, in part for the reasons noted in thepreceding paragraphs and in part because, in the post-Columbian world, the cartographer creating a worldmap has no choice but to represent broad (but notinfinite) swaths of both land-space and ocean-space.On a post-Columbian world map, the ocean cannot beignored, but it can be presented as external to socialprocesses. It is the evolution of this representation thatis traced in the next section of this article.

To assemble the data set of printed world maps

analyzed here, I first reviewed 393 maps reprinted inShirley’s (2001) The Mapping of the World: Early PrintedWorld Maps, 1472–1700 (4th ed.), a cartobibliographyof every known printed world map from that era thatalso includes, in most cases, legible reprints.10 By 1700,the number of world maps being printed each year hadexploded and it would have been impossible to identify,let alone analyze, the entire population. Instead, forthe eighteenth century, I searched through sheet maps,reprint books, atlases, special geography, travel narra-tives, and other books and magazines likely to containworld maps at each of four major research libraries noted

for their map collections, as well as utilizing Web-basedsources.11 This resulted in my identifying and annotat-ing 198 maps from the eighteenth century, for a totaldata set of 591 maps (Table 2).

Externalizing the Ocean

An initial indicator of the construction of the oceanas an external space, beyond society and nature andwithout distinct places, can be seen in Table 1, as thenumber of ocean toponyms in the world maps in vol-

umes of Ptolemy’s Geography dropped dramatically dur-ing the early sixteenth century, from a high of fiftyin 1480 to a maximum of fourteen in maps printedfrom 1522 on. Despite this trend in Ptolemaic rep-resentations, however, the sixteenth century was notan era in which the ocean simply was emptied of so-cial, natural, and metaphysical significance. Althoughelements of mercantilist-era ideology constructed theocean as a “great void” (thus prefiguring the ideal that

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Table 2. Number of maps annotated, by year of production

Range of

years Number of maps

1501–1525 21

1526–1550 26

1551–1575 34

1576–1600 631601–1625 55

1626–1650 48

1651–1675 54

1676–1700 92

1701–1725 35

1726–1750 19

1751–1775 45

1776–1800 99

Total 591

was to predominate under industrial capitalism), themercantilist-era ocean was also constructed as a space of social power, routes of connection, fearsome biota, sci-entific exploration, and romantic imagination (Stein-berg 2001) and even its idealized immateriality wasimbued with metaphysical significance (Connery2006). As several scholars of empire have noted, theidea of an intervening, marine space between the coreand the periphery was crucial to the discursive and ma-terial workings of the era’s European empires (Richards1993; Said 1993; Dettelbach 1996; Sidaway and Power2005). Portuguese conquerors, for instance, claimed dis-

tant territories in the Americas not by celebrating thatthey had found a distant land but by celebrating thatthey had discovered a way to get there (Seed 1995).In short, the ocean played a crucial role in both thematerial life and the imagination of sixteenth- througheighteenth-century Europeans, and its materiality andsocial significance could not simply be wished awayby the era’s cartographers. Eventually, the ideal of theocean as a “great void” beyond society, suggested bythe decline in ocean toponyms on Ptolemaic maps, pre-vailed, and this ideal continues to serve as a counter-point to the ideal of land-space as a universe of naturally

occurring bounded “insides” (Steinberg 2001). It tookseveral centuries, however, for cartographers to aligntheir representation of the ocean with the emergentnorm of state territoriality.

In the meantime,mercantilist-era cartographers werefaced with a crisis of representation that paralleled asimilar crisis in ocean regulation (Steinberg 1999b):How does one depict the ocean as a space of connec-tion, in which case its “value” is best emphasized by

portraying the ocean as a space devoid of any socialinfluence or materiality that might interfere with thefree flow of ships, while, at the same time, depicting theocean’s crucial function in mercantilist-era cosmologyand political economy? This crisis echoes the afore-mentioned problems in representing the practices andspaces of mobility: How does one depict (and even cel-ebrate the importance of) a process that is ideally never“there”?

To trace the changing representation of the oceanon world maps, I focus on graphic images that are placedon the ocean by cartographers. Although some mightdismiss these artistic flourishes as the decorative whimof the cartographer, contrasting them with the map asan expression of scientific knowledge, this distinctionbetween map as science and image as art is misguided(Woodward 1987a; Casey 2005; Cosgrove 2006; Wood2006). Jacob rhetorically asks:

Do not these graphic features [and the absence offeatures— pes] reveal culturally determined choices, a con-ception of the world and a state of knowledge and think-ing? Do they notconstitute a fundamental level that mightbring to light the purpose of the map, the intellectual,emotional, and imaginary affects that it might arouse, farexceeding a simple geographical reading? (Jacob 2006,103–4)

Thus, for instance, the decline in ocean toponyms onPtolemaic world maps during the early sixteenth cen-tury indicates not so much a change in scientific knowl-

edge (it seems unlikely that knowledge of the oceandeclined so precipitously during this era) but rather achanging conception of what the ocean is (or shouldbe). This is all the more so for nontextual images which,by “reintroduc[ing] the particular into an undifferenti-ated space” (Jacob 2006, 159), communicate the per-ceived character or nature of a region.

The Sixteenth-Century Ocean: A Space of Matter

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, mostcartographers, following the convention of Ptolemaic

world maps, made little distinction between land andsea. They typically represented the ocean as a material,textured space through such techniques as stipling ordrawing in waves (Figure 3). This was a problematicrepresentation, though, for the emergent ideal of theocean as an empty, external void, because a materialocean presented potential obstacles to movement. Fur-thermore, such an ocean presumably consisted of placeswith distinct natures, and these could then be enclosed

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Figure 3. Detail of the Pacific coast of Central America from Ortelius (1570).

by boundaries that would serve as further barriers tomobility. If capitalism is built around the fantasy of the“annihilation of space with time” and, in particular,

through the designation of empty spaces of movementthat are especially amenable to annihilation, then theidea of the ocean as a material, textured space of naturewas incompatible with this emergent capitalist ideal.The prevalence of this representation, which might beconsidered a holdover from medieval perspectives of theocean as a viscous swamp rather than a wet nothing-ness (Lestringant 1989; Cosgrove 2001; Gillis 2004),rapidly declined during the study period, peaking in thelate sixteenth century and disappearing entirely by 1700(Figure 4, bottom frame).

As cartographers began to turn away from represent-

ing the ocean as land-like, they nonetheless continuedto represent it as a material space of nature and soci-ety, highlighting specifically marine characteristics bydrawing in generic ships as well as marine biota such asfish and sea monsters (Figure 3). Although these newrepresentations, which peaked between 1550 and 1650,began to establish the basis for a conceptual distinctionbetween land and sea as practically different kinds of spaces with different features and social processes, they

still implied that the ocean, like land, was filled withsocial processes and natural features and that therefore,like land, it could be bounded, controlled, and orga-

nized. Such an image of the ocean was incompatiblewith the emergent ideal of an ocean beyond society,counterposed against a world of bounded land territo-ries that contain and define fundamental societal units.Thus, by 1700, ships and biota, like stipling and waves,had nearly disappeared from representations of the sea(Figure 4).12

The Seventeenth-Century Ocean: A Spaceof Routes

If the sixteenth century was characterized by depic-

tions of the ocean as a space of nature and society, theseventeenth century was dominated by depictions of theocean as a space of routes. The first of these represen-tations to gain ascendency was the drawing of rhumblines that, as has been noted, served no navigationalpurpose on world maps but served to impart the ideathat the ocean was a space on which one could navi-gate by constructing routes through a putatively place-less in-between space (Figure 5). Rhumb lines, which

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Figure 4. Median number of ships or marine biota per square meter and percentage displaying texture on the ocean, for world maps printed

between 1501 and 1800, grouped by twenty-five-year intervals. On ship and biota graphs, a bold line indicates median, a box indicates

interquartile range, and “whisker” indicates 1.5 times the interquartile range. Outliers have been omitted to enable presentation at a legible

scale.

were most common in the period between 1600 and1650 but persisted through 1700, were followed by asecond depiction, most often occurring between 1650and 1725, in which the names of basin-based oceanregions (e.g., the South Atlantic for the body of wa-

ter between the east coast of South America and thewest coast of Africa) were replaced by a series of re-gions defined by coast-hugging arcs (e.g., the EthiopianOcean, which arced beneath the African continent,from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean; Fig-ure 6; see also Lewis 1999). Arced ocean regions, likerhumb lines, suggested that the ocean consisted of aseries of routes that could be traveled. This same timeperiod also saw the emergence of a third representation

that similarly portrayed the ocean as a space of routes:generic commercial routes, such as the route to theEast Indies.

By depicting the ocean as a space of differentiatedand functional routes, the ocean was cartographically

represented in a manner that closely paralleled its legaldesignation during the same era as res extra commercium.According to this doctrine, expressed most famously byGrotius ([1608] 1916) in his treatise Mare Liberum, al-though the ocean provides a resource and thus can beconceived of as property of a sort, it cannot be fullypossessed (with all the rights of exclusion and alien-ation normally associated with property) because theprincipal resource that it provides—an environment for

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Figure 5. World map from Teixeira (1630).

Figure 6. Detail of South America from Nolin (1708).

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navigation—is inexhaustible and, as such, is granted toall by natural law (Steinberg 2001).

This conceptualization of the ocean, both in mapsof the era and in the legal doctrine of res extra com-mercium, was transitional. On the one hand, unlike thesixteenth-century depiction of the ocean, the ocean wasno longer perceived as consisting of specific points thatwere rich with nature and that hypothetically couldbe gathered into territories, enclosed, and developed,like land. On the other hand, although the depictionof the ocean as a space of distinct routes was not thesame as land-space, neither was it the antithesis of land.The ocean was still represented as a space of pathwaysand discrete (if not enclosable) spaces, something morematerial than the empty and abstract “hyperspace of pure circulation” (Castells 1996, 475) that was to pre-vail later as a counterpoint to the division of land intobounded territories. Although the specific ways of de-

picting the ocean as a space of routes waxed and wanedduring the seventeenth century, all of these depictionshad essentially disappeared by 1725 (Figure 7).

The Eighteenth-Century Ocean: A Space ofMathematics and Memory

By 1700, a new set of depictions of the ocean hademerged, solidifying the ocean’s position as an externalvoid that could serve as a counterpoint to the terri-torial state. The first of these depictions already hadbegun to appear early in the seventeenth century: the

ecliptic (or zodiac) line (Figure 6). Much like rhumblines, the ecliptic line pays homage to the act of navi-gation without actually enabling navigation. However,unlike rhumb lines or the other navigational signifiersthat were common during the previous century (arcedocean regions and generic commerce routes), however,the ecliptic line signifies that the ocean is less a spaceof discrete routes than an abstract, mathematical, andmaterially empty space of points that can be crossed atwill. Whereas the earlier generation of signifiers thatpointed to the ocean as a space of mobility still implieda degree of materiality, social relations, and limits, the

ecliptic line suggests that the ocean is a space of puremathematical abstraction, a dematerialized arena of po-tentially limitless time–space compression, or idealizedannihilation.

Cartographers during the eighteenth centuryadopted a second means to demonstrate that the oceanwas a space of mobility, by depicting theships and routesof historic explorers such as Columbus, Magellan, andDrake (Figures 6 and 8). In this way, the ocean waspresented as a space of movement that achieved its sig-

nificance not through its contemporary materiality orthrough ongoing interactions with its nature or evenits space but as an arena of history. Depictions of his-toric explorers’ routes celebrated the ocean—and, insome cases, specific ocean regions or specific historicalinteractions with the ocean—as a source of nationalpride and identity formation. At the same time, how-ever, they avoided any implication that the ocean wasa space for contemporary social activity or assertions ofterritorial power. Although explorers’ routes suggestedthat the ocean was historically significant and the eclip-tic line suggested that it could continue to serve soci-ety through limitless crossing, these two representationsalso suggested that it was a space beyond the world ofdevelopable places and enclosable state-territories thatwas emerging on land.

The third ocean representation that was commonin the eighteenth century demonstrates the extent to

which producers (and, presumably, consumers) of mapshad come to accept a distinction between land as aset of developable points, defined by the boundaries ofthe territorial state, and the ocean as an empty outsidethat defied territorialization, civilization, or differen-tiation into “places” of nature and society. The GrandBanks,thehighlyproductive fishinggroundoff thecoastof Newfoundland, on the one hand, had the physicalproperties of the ocean, but, on the other hand, had thesocial properties of land as it could be bounded and de-veloped. The Grand Banks thus was a geographic outlierthat defied the modern ordering of the world with its

division between developable terrestrial territories anda marine nonterritory of mobility. To cope with thisoutlier space, cartographers of the era borrowed a seriesof representations that were commonly used on largerscale navigational maps to depict shallows or shoals—shading, stipling, or dotted lines—to depict the GrandBanks as an intermediate space (Figure 8).

Finally, although the focus of this article has beenon the construction of the ocean as an unboundableand empty space of movement—an external counter-point to the emergent idea of the territorial state as abounded arena of control and development-in-place—

it bears noting that the emergence of these final threesignifiers that suggest the ocean’s status as a space be-yond society coincided with the rise of territorial stateboundaries on world maps (Figure 9). Indeed, a gener-alized linear model applied to the data summarized inFigure 9 (controlling for interyear variance by using themean value for each year with multiple data points) re-veals that the presence of each of these three signifiers ispositively correlated with the presence of state bound-ary lines, and the correlation between the ecliptic line

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Figure 7. Percentage of world maps printed between 1501 and 1800 displaying rhumb lines, curved oceans, or generic maritime commerce

routes, grouped by twenty-five-year intervals.

Figure 8. Detail of the Grand Banks from Nolin (1708).

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Figure 9. Percentage of world maps printed between 1501 and 1800 displaying the ecliptic line, explorers’ routes, the Grand Banks, or state

boundary lines, grouped by twenty-five-year intervals.

and state boundary lines is significant at the 0.001 level( p = 0.000274). This corresponds with the findings of others who have traced the emergence of state boundarylines from a more traditional perspective that roots therise of the territorial state in a history of boundary draw-ing and the designation of “insides” (e.g., Sahlins 1989;Akerman 1995; Black 1997; Brotton 1998; Biggs 1999;Kamen 2000; B. Anderson 2006). By 1800, boundarylines that defined both insides and outsides were thenorm.

Conclusions

Since the nineteenth century, few cartographers

or policymakers have dissented from the dominantview of the ocean as an external space, beyond theworld of state-societies. Although Mahan (1890) andMackinder (1904) differed greatly in their opinionsregarding the geopolitical significance of the ocean—Mahan saw it as the arena on which global dominancewould continue to be fought, whereas Mackinder feltthat its days as a crucial surface for asserting and project-ing force had passed—the perspectives of both geopo-litical theorists rested on

an idealization of the sea as an unmanaged and un-manageable surface . . . that resonates with the spatialassumptions that permeate realist theories of interna-tional politics. . . . As unclaimed and unclaimable “in-

ternational” space, the world-ocean lends itself to beingconstructed as the space of anarchic competition par ex-cellence, where ontologically pre-existent and essentiallyequivalent nation-states do battle in unbridled competi-tion for global spoils. (Steinberg 2001, 17)

In other words, both sides of this keystone geopoliti-cal debate accepted the construction of the ocean asa fundamentally external space, a counterpoint to thebounded, terrestrial state within whose borders the an-archy of global competition was contained.

Given the degree to which this externalization of the

ocean has been accepted, it is not surprising that onefinds few world maps today that display the ocean fea-tures that were prevalent in the sixteenth, seventeenth,or eighteenth centuries. By the twentieth century, car-tographers had few qualms about making maps thatimplied that the ocean was fundamentally external tomodern society and its foundational territorial units(Konvitz 1979). Indeed, it is noteworthy that few mod-ern “political” world maps depict the political divisionsof the ocean—territorial waters, exclusive economic

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zones, high seas, and so on—instead portraying an un-differentiated, featureless space. This is yet another in-dication of how, by the twentieth century, there wasan accepted distinction between land as the space of sedentarism, civilization, and politics and the oceanas an external, asocial space across which one simplymoved.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the idea of land-space as the domain of bounded, developable in-sides and the ocean as an external surface for movementhad become so entrenched that contemporary cartogra-phers were faced with a representational dilemma simi-lar to the one that had been posed by the Grand Banks:How does onedepictAntarctica? Like theGrand Banks,Antarctica has the physical properties of one element(it is solid, like land) but the social properties of theother element (it resists division into sovereign, terri-torial space, albeit with some dissent). Thus, on the

Central Intelligence Agency’s (2000) political worldmap, land is beige (and divided by state boundaries),the ocean is blue (and undivided), and Antarctica, asan outlier space that is not quite land or territory but notquite sea or nonterritory, is designated with a unique,third color: white (Figure 10).

Despite the prevalence of the ocean as external tosociety in today’s cartographic representations, the his-tory narrated in this article reveals that the depictionof the ocean as a space beyond territorialization, andthe parallel depiction of land as a series of discrete,bounded territories, was a long time in the making.

Indeed, the idea of depicting the ocean as a materi-ally empty wilderness likely was counterintuitive to themercantilist-era cartographer, both because one wouldexpect a significant space to have a tangible materialityand because cartographers likely were aware that theocean was not truly an undifferentiated mass devoid of nature. Thus, this history of ocean mapping reveals how,although maps achieve their power by attributing fixedproperties to bounded and apparently natural spaces,the act of attempting to fix properties to space (by boththe map’s producer and its consumer) “offers produc-tive possibilities, particularly through the emergence of

constitutive spaces at/in the ‘gaps and fissures’ of themapping processes” (Del Casino and Hanna 2006, 41).These “gaps and fissures” can occur at specific spacesthat defy emergent categorizations (as, for instance,can be seen in the decision to depict spaces like theGrand Banks and Antarctica with intermediate repre-sentations that both reproduce and challengethe binarydivision of the world into social and extrasocial spaces)or they can be more conceptual (as, for instance, in at-

tempts by mercantilist-era cartographers to develop anideological framework wherein spaces of mobility wereperceived as both socially significant and materiallyempty).

A history of how producers and users of maps at-tempt to fill these “gaps and fissures” so that they canbe placed within a priori categories of inside and out-side, fixity and mobility, and social and extrasocial,and how these “gaps and fissures” nonetheless reap-pear, suggests that the study and practice (or perfor-mance) of cartography can play an important role ingenerating new perspectives on the categories and in-stitutions that define modern society. As Kwan (2007)notes, a range of alternative visualization practitioners,from advocates of consciousness-raising participatorygeographic information systems to situationist membersof the art-and-cartography movement, have made thisassertion. Perhaps it is not surprising that so many of

these individuals’ experiments with alternative modesof visualization focus on mobility. As the examples dis-cussed here have shown, it is difficult to represent spacesof mobility in a manner that simultaneously portraysthe experience of movement, the metric space throughwhich one is moving, the idealized immateriality of that space, the actual materiality of that space, and thespace’s significance in the reproduction of social in-stitutions that go beyond the practices or designatedspaces of mobility. Thus, the depiction of mobilityhas emerged as an arena not just for gaining new in-sights on the world, but also for advancing cartographic

practice.Kwan’s (2008) work is representative of these exper-

iments in cartographic representation, as she combinesthe representational practices of time-geography withan attempt to depict the subjective perceptions andemotions of individuals moving through an urban en-vironment (in this case, Muslim women in Columbus,Ohio). This work is exemplary not just because Kwanattempts to portray the experiences of individuals. Itis also significant because, in representing these expe-riences, Kwan reconstitutes the city not as a series of points with ontologically prior characteristics but as a

series of affect-laden surfaces with meanings that are re-alized by the individual as he or she moves across them(or, in instances when the space is perceived as toodangerous, as he or she contemplates moving acrossthem).

In bringing mobility to the center of her mappingof both personal and urban spaces, Kwan aligns herself with a growing number of scholars who stress that mo-bility is a constitutive social practice (Hannam, Sheller,

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Figure 10. Political world map by the Central Intelligence Agency (2000).

and Urry 2006). As this article has suggested, this newfocus on mobility has far-reaching ramifications: Recen-tering movement (and the subjective experiences thatemerge as one moves) involves rethinking a series of cartographic as well as political norms that have devel-oped over hundreds of years and that underlie the veryfoundation of modern society.

Thus, this article suggests two related agendas forfurther research. In one sense, this article has calledfor inverting foreground and background on our maps.Instead of focusing attention on the bounded land ter-ritories that we take for granted as the spaces of soci-ety, what would happen if we foregrounded the spacesacross which people (and commodities, information,and capital) move, so that they become conceived of assomething other than the residual spaces that are left“outside” society? As this study has shown, the designa-tion of some spaces as external spaces of mobility has

played a key role in the ways in which we order ourworld, including the ways in which we bound and orderthe “inside” spaces in which mobility is purported toplay only a secondary role. Although cultural studiesand critical development theorists have for some timefocused on the processes by which cultures are des-ignated as “others” that are in need of development(e.g., Said 1978), much less attention has been de-voted to the processes by which some of the world’sspaces have been designated as being so “outside” thatthey lack even the potential for development. Histori-cally, the construction of the modern system of territo-rial states has also involved the designation of outsidesas being beyond territorial control, and as one stud-ies the processes of drawing (and ascribing meaningto) boundary lines, one must focus on the constructionof outsides as well as insides. Furthermore, this pro-cess has not ended with the formation of the juridical

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ideal of the modern, sovereign, territorial nation-state.There are numerous configurations by which spacesand peoples can be constructed as inside or outsidethe protection of the state, and this is as much a pro-cess of constructing outsides as it is one of constructinginsides.13

This agenda, however, also suggests a second, moreradical agenda where, instead of tracing the historic ex-ternalization of a specific space (like the ocean) or socialfunction (like mobility), we revision a world withoutdistinct insides and outsides. Under this agenda, onewould go beyond bringing externalized spaces of mo-bility to the foreground. Instead, one would considerthat, in fact, all spaces are spaces of both mobility andfixity and all social processes are driven by ideologies of both internalization and externalization. This is an am-bitious agenda. Analytical thought, after all, involvesdifferentiating, comparing, and drawing “lines” of con-

trast. A first step, however, might well involve erasingthe boundaries on our maps that divide inside from out-side. Perhaps then we can begin working from behindthe lines.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was supported by a JohnS. Best Fellowship from the American GeographicalSociety Collection at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a Short Term Fellowship in the History

of Cartography from the Newberry Library, a fellowshipfrom the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center forScholars and Writers at theNewYork PublicLibrary, anArthur and Janet Holzheimer Fellowship from the In-stitute for Research in the Humanities and the Historyof Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an Other Globalizations Fellowship fromthe Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz.

In addition, I am grateful for comments and ques-tions from audience members at presentations of ear-lier versions of this article at Rutgers, Lund, Princeton,

and Louisiana State Universities, the National Univer-sity of Singapore, and the Universities of Washington,Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and California–Santa Cruz.Additional thanks go to Seth Bassett, Barbie Bischof,Mei-Po Kwan, and the anonymous reviewers for com-ments on final drafts of this article, with further thanksto Seth Bassett for assistance in preparing graphics andconducting statistical analysis.

Notes

1. Some of the classics in this literature include Anzaldua(1987), Butler (1990), Gilroy (1993), Bhabha (1994),Appadurai (1996a), Clifford (1997), Gupta and Fer-guson (1997), Ong (1998), and Tsing (2004). Of par-ticular interest here are scholars who have used thisperspective to question the ontology of the sovereign,

territorial state, such as Shapiro and Alker (1995), New-man (1999), Albert, Jacobson, and Lapid (2001), Sparke(2005), and Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007).

2. Price (2004) makes a similar point, specifically with ref-erence to critical borderland studies. See also Cresswell(2006).

3. By 1755 theterritorialdemarcationof stateson maps hadbeen normalized to the point that Robert de Vaugondyfelt it necessary to apologize for the omission of SanMarino from his map of Europe because of its small size,even though “the republic of San Marino carries as muchauthority in its territory as the republic of Venice in itsown” (cited in Jacob 2006, 75).

4. State formation and territorialization—and the adop-tion of an abstract-relational perspective regarding one’shomeland—also require participation from “below,”which makes the entire process much more contingentand unpredictable. See, for instance, discussions on thepotential for countermapping as a means of constructingnarratives and land-tenure relations outside the statediscourse that presupposes interchangeable points onan abstract grid (Peluso 1995; Sparke 1998; St. Martin2001; Walker and Peters 2001; Fox 2002; Hodgson andSchroeder 2002) and, more generally, discussions of howmapping as a process involves participation by the mapuser as well as the mapmaker (Kitchin and Dodge 2007).

5. Todorov (1984) makes a similar argument with regardto the role of written language.

6. This point is elaborated on, with reference to the world

of electronic communications, in McDowell, Steinberg,and Tomasello (2008).7. This deficiency is exemplified by de Certeau’s (1991,

120) remarkthat themappamundiis “not a ‘geographicalmap’ but ‘history book’” and is in keeping with his moregeneral tendency to set a dynamic conception of timeagainst a static conception of space (Massey 2005).

8. The decline in ocean-region names during the sixteenthcentury is discussed later in this article.

9. Kitchin and Dodge (2007) make much the same pointwhen arguing for a focus on “mappings” in which themap is continually reproduced by the user.

10. Shirley identifies 628 known printed world maps from1501on(1501wasusedasthestartdatebecausethereareno known printed world maps from the period between

1492 and 1500). Of these, 214 were excluded becausethe Shirley book did not contain a legible reproduction(inmost cases,Shirley hadchosen not to reproducethesemaps because they were almost identical to maps that hedid reproduce). Two additional maps were excluded be-cause, notwithstanding their appearance in the Shirleyvolume, they were not, in fact, printed world maps.

In addition, because the goal of this project wasto document prevailing worldviews of the time, I ex-cluded maps that sought to reproduce some other era’s

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cosmology, and thus I omitted thirteen maps reproducedby Shirley that had been created specifically to reproducea classical or medieval map type or illustrate a biblicalstory or a metaphysical principle. Likewise, because myaim was to reproduce changes in the representation of the ocean as an “outside,” I omitted two maps repro-duced by Shirley that were explicitly oceanographic incontent. Finally, my goal was to trace the evolution of

the “Western” worldview, a problematic perspective inthat it assumes a “West” that is both unified and iso-lated. Nonetheless, given that the modern state system(and the idea of the territorial state with an extrater-ritorial outside) was a “Western” invention, even if itwas one that subsequently has been modified and eveninfluenced by non-Western societies (e.g., Thongchai1994), I somewhat arbitrarily defined Western maps asthose that used Latin lettering, leading to the exclusionof a further four maps, one each in Russian, Turkish,Armenian, and Greek.

11. The four libraries utilized were the American Geograph-ical Society Library, the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, and various libraries at the Univer-sity of Wisconsin–Madison (including the WisconsinHistorical Society).

12. As Jacob (2006) notes, both de Certeau and Latour dis-cuss the disappearance of ships on world maps, speculat-ing that the ships had been depicted to pay homage tothe process by which the world (and the ocean) came tobe known and that their disappearance attested to geo-graphical knowledge and its representation being takenfor granted. However, the close correspondence betweenthe rise and fall of representations of ships with the riseand fall of marine biota suggests otherwise. A correla-tion analysis run on the raw data (not aggregated intotwenty-five-year intervals) reveals a positive correlationbetween the number of ships and the number of biota,with an extremely significant p value of 2.220−16. This

correlation suggests that the ships, rather than represent-ing the process by which the ocean came to be known,simply represented the ideal that the ocean was a spaceof social processes as well as natural features.

13. See, for instance, Gaynor’s (2007) study of the Indone-sian government’s attitudes toward that country’s outly-ing islands, the people who inhabit these islands, and theocean that connects (and separates) Java from these is-lands. See also work that applies Agamben (1998) to theU.S. Global War on Terror and its extraterritorial inter-rogation and detention centers (Agamben 2004; Butler2004; Gregory and Pred 2007).

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306–2190, e-mail: [email protected].

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