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This chapter begins with a survey of the general format of Nubian land sales and a discussion of the purchase prices these land sales indicate for the plots of land at stake. It attempts to use the description of these plots in concert with general information about the watering capacity of a saqiya or waterwheel to determine the size of the typical Nubian land holding. It then explores the evidence for a possible system of land surveys in medieval Nubia and the evidence for land inheritance, land fragmentation, and potential inheritance disputes in medieval Nubia.

Geographers only began to make a serious contribution to urban debates in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Their contributions fed actively into policy-making during and immediately after World War II, when geographers began to be recruited in substantial numbers into the new planning machinery at both central and local government levels, following the passage of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. But there was one notable if somewhat eccentric exception, who must form a preamble to the main story. He was Patrick Geddes, a trained botanist who made his mark at the very start of the twentieth century. Another person who made an outstanding geographical contribution to planning was Lionel Dudley Stamp, who single-handedly launched the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain. This chapter also discusses the direct impact of academic geography upon planning in the country.

Land surveying has long been a tool of empire, linked not coincidentally with the development and hegemony of white European society over Native peoples in the New World. Once land was formally located and officially acquired, the multiple purposes of establishing individual ownership, taxable value, and legal jurisdiction were embodied in the person of the land surveyor. The surveyor not only carried considerable state-invested power but swore an oath that affirmed his honesty, the accuracy of his measures, and his loyalty to the state's protocols of property definition and distribution.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise an array of “colonial legacies” left in the wake of Spanish monarchical rule. Drawing on New Granada as a case in point, this chapter considers two revealing examples of how Spanish American contributions to emerging social sciences challenged prevailing European and North Atlantic ideas about race well before the late nineteenth century adoption and adaptation of eugenics. The first example emerges from an 1830s land-surveying catechism by noted New Granadan educator and publicist, Lorenzo María Lleras. The catechism sought to ensure equitable land surveys of indigenous communal land holding. The second example spotlights José María Samper’s mid-century invention of comparative political sociology. Spanish American intellectuals like Lleras and Samper ultimately believed that the deployment of sciences in society would produce a new “race” of democratic republicans.

Thoreau made several surveys purely for the pleasure of experimentation. In addition to the surveys of Walden in 1846 and White Pond in 1851, Thoreau apparently made a recreational plan of the Old Marlborough Road sometime in the 1840s. During his paid surveying jobs in and around Concord, Thoreau often carried out “unnecessary” science, recording data that were of value only to himself as writer-naturalist. He often carried portable surveying instruments on his almost daily woodland excursions.

Hero of Alexandria flourished in the late first century AD, and a considerable number of works on mechanics and applied mathematics are associated with his name. The Dioptra, a relatively brief work describing a rather elaborate sighting instrument of that name, illustrates his interest in the meeting of mathematics and the practical world, and apart from a closely derivative late Byzantine text, it stands as the only surviving Greek treatise on land surveying. Hero's dioptra is presented in the scholarly literature on ancient surveying as both the most sophisticated instrument of its kind, equivalent to a modern theodolite, and as a clumsy and impractical device, of little use to practising surveyors. This chapter looks more closely at the form and capabilities of the dioptra, the methods of surveying proposed by Hero, and the reasons for the limitations in its design and use.

The story of aeriality and midwesternness is a complicated mixture of innovation and continuity. It begins with an assessment of preaviation aerial gazes as a means of seeing, conceptualizing, and constructing prairie space. Faced with the unconventional topography of the prairie in its natural state, the region’s first settlers found traditional horizontally oriented modes of sight insufficiently able to convey an imagery for, or an understanding of, the region. Consequently, the first Midwesterners developed an alternative practice of envisioning the region in which imagined bird’s-eye prospects, coupled with more abstract and cartographically constructed gazes, provided a means to escape the overwhelming openness and relative featurelessness of the terrain and imagine the landscape as organized and hospitable. These practices of aerial looking also exhibited substantial congruence to the broad, rational gaze embedded in the government’s land-survey grid—the actual and ideological template by which the region was settled. Chapter 1 underscores the ways that that grid view and aerial imagination came together to fashion a particular, Jeffersonian, image of the region and its inhabitants and a specialized mode of atlas-oriented prairie description and representation. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for understanding the historically constructed relationship between Midwestern identity and aerial representation.

Thoreau's journals reflect deep ambivalence about his work, referring to surveying at various times as “insignificant drudgery,” “a vulgar necessity,” “grinding at the mill of the philistines” and “barren work.” The journals also record the sense of loss he felt at the extent of New England's environmental transformation. In a particularly moving passage of November 9, 1850, Thoreau is struck by the beauty of “a young grove of pitch pines” but immediately considers their probable demise. The trees, it is lamented, are “regarded even by the woodman as ‘trash’” and are thus “destined for the locomotive's maw.” The great sadness of the passage, however, stems from Thoreau's discernment of the part he was to play in the destruction of the grove.

The opening chapter conceives the organizational development of the state in Korea from the late nineteenth century to the end of Japanese colonialism as rationalizations of—and responses to—imperialism. Beginning with an extensive overview of the late Joseon dynastic state, it tracks the multiple trajectories of state growth and strengthening over the early modern era, from the fiscal to the bureaucratic and other forms, but it also analyzes how the various lines of the state’s fragmentation reflected competing political and administrative imperatives. To illustrate this argument, the chapter takes as case studies the two major state land surveys (1898–1902 and 1910–1918), as well as the practices of comprehensive social intervention during the wartime mobilization (1938–1945).

This chapter shows how the land titling reform worked to wrest power away from local-level officials into the hands of the central government. It talks about local officials that managed to amass land by clearing forest in expectation of the land reform, while in other areas local people mobilized to prevent the elite's capture of the reform and produce new relationships with local officials. It also examines the relationships between local state officials and their constituencies during the Order 01 land reform. The chapter reviews the leopard skin land reform, which can be seen as the prime minister's attempt to wrest control over land distribution from local authorities in upland areas. It analyzes the rural people's narratives that suggest multiple strategies local authorities and other elites used to grab land, such as clearing forestland in advance of the land survey.

The chapter aspires to describe some of the basic aspects of our media culture by pointing to the histories, interconnections and mutual translatability of imaging grid (as introduced by Alberti), cartographic grid (as introduced by Ptolemy), topographic grid (as put to use by early modern Spanish colonialism), speculative grid (as put to use by the land surveys of the early United States), and planning grid (as introduced by architects like Neufert and Le Corbusier in the twentieth century). Like in the case of the Renaissance grid that effectivelyc ombines an imaging process (Alberti’s velum) with a topographical planning procedure (the colonial settlement of Latin America), it is the linking of representational and operative functions, which turns the grid into a formidable cultural technique. Linked with the convertibility of these diverse grids and with corresponding scaling techniques, grids have become the basis of a mediatization of space from which hardly anything can escape.

This chapter illustrates that the capture of agricultural policy benefits by the initial land owners is not new. It contributes to the understanding of the distribution of farm subsidies in several ways. First, it investigates the differential impact of the principal farm programs because the breakdown of government payments at both the farm and the county level can both be observed. Second, because the location of each farm is known, nonagricultural pressures on the land can be controlled for and how they affect its value can be determined. This puts observers in a unique position to be able to assess directly the extent to which owners and farmer operators share the benefits of various agricultural programs, a useful complement to the indirect assessment that can be obtained from investigating land values.

The International Map of the World was effectively dormant during World War II, and not long after its postwar revival under the umbrella of the United Nations it was drastically reconceived in the 1960s. The UN eventually discontinued its support altogether in 1986. This chapter uses the wartime and postwar history of the International Map to trace the shifting fortunes of representational mapping in general. It highlights the intense competition between the IMW and the World Aeronautical Chart, which was created by the US during the war but was then adopted by ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization. It also discusses related projects like the World Land Use Survey, the World Population Map, the Carte Internationale du Tapis Végétal, the International Map of the Roman Empire, and map-design research by the US military. The overall trajectory connects the decline of the IMW to the rise of cartographic regionalism, a new understanding of maps as tools rather than objective repositories of geographic fact, and the “critical” cartographic scholarship of the 1980s – all of which signal a rejection of the kind of epistemic authority that once anchored international mapping.

Man Mound Park protects something unique: a human-shaped effigy mound. At the time of Native/European contact in what is now Wisconsin, the landscape contained an estimated 15,000–20,000 Indian mounds. A succession of native societies had constructed the mounds over a 2,000-year period, from about 800 bc to 1200 ad. Over the last century and a half, agriculture and development have obliterated at least three-fourths of Wisconsin's Indian mounds. Of just nine known mounds built in the shape of a human or humanlike figure, Man Mound is the only one that survives in a relatively intact state. From Man Mound, we can look out and see that the history of Wisconsin's natural and human communities is woven together on Wisconsin's landscape. From here we can try to discern patterns in that relationship. This chapter begins with a review of the broad narrative of Wisconsin's past. It then discusses the impact of the advent of the public land survey on Wisconsin's landscapes and biodiversity.

With a detailed study of the procedures of the young American astronomer, E. P. Mason (in part 1) and the celebrated English scientist, Sir John F. W. Herschel (in part 2), chapter 3 is focused on the relationship between conception and perception, particularly in the context of bringing to bear the numerical into the production of the pictorial representations of the nebulae. In the work of both Mason and Herschel, conceptions are used to prepare sheets of paper in order to receive and fix visual inscriptions. For both, these preparations derive from cartographical practices, but it is only in the work of Herschel that the motives and the structure of the observational records spring from an empiricist notion of the “constructive activity” of the mind (a philosophical notion formulated in contrast to William Whewell’s and Sir W. R. Hamilton’s apriorism).

The book’s conclusion discusses state practices and techniques of cartography, surveying and statistics and looks at examples from many particular histories of states and their territories. It therefore outlines ways in which territory came to be understood and practiced as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and we must therefore think measure and control—the technical and the legal—alongside the economic and strategic. This political technology is one of the means by which we can understand the emergence and development of the modern state.

Tod’s practice of science in India took place in the scientific context of the first two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, which were the occasion of the institutionalisation of major earth sciences like topographical surveying, geology and botany. In India, colonial British scientists practised empirical field observations in these physical sciences in an overall framework of classifications and causatory explanations, inspired by the Common Sense philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. With the help of his British companions, his Indian assistants and Western scientific instruments, Tod recorded notations of relative topographical positions of places, geological formations and botanical specialities of the regions he traversed. Since he was not a trained scientist himself, Tod’s scientific remarks include utilitarian reflections on the economic potential of the natural resources of Rajasthan and Gujarat, but also show that in his own way he participated in the introduction of Western science into Indian contexts.

This chapter explores why the types of forests we see vary from place to place and over time. It relies on two types of historic records: the layers of sediment from lake bottoms that contain a 10,000-year accumulation of pollen grains and the written records from the individuals that conducted Wisconsin's public land survey in the mid-1800s. It shows that forests change constantly, through time and across space. The interplay of climate, the physical environment, natural events, and human history has shaped, and continue to shape, the forests that seen today.