In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Prov ince occupied the entirety of a City , and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Prov ince. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Ge...

‘[T]he entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.’ So wrote Mary Louise Pratt, at the start of Imperial Eyes (1992: 6), her insightful account of colonial travelogue. Pratt’s point provides a pithy summary of one of the central claims of what was, at the time, the still emerging field of postcolonial studies (in which context, of course, Imperial Ey...

Matthew New-Tolley 310213657 Semester 2 2010 On an unremarkable page in the extraordinary book of technological evolution, artisans labour to produce an exquisite vessel, a gift by the priests of Rome to the leader of an empire. Centuries of scientific enterprise and craftsmanship culminate in a single vessel, a dull jade chalice which when presented to the sun blazes crimson. With the collapse...

The period 1700 to 1900 saw the beginnings, and the development, of the British Empire in India. Empire was not planned, at least not in the early stages. In a sense, it just happened. The first British in India came for trade, not territory; they were businessmen, not conquerors. It can be argued that they came from a culture that was inferior, and a political entity that was weaker, than that...