Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Steven Seegel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xii and 368 pp., figures, illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-226-74425-4).

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, solve a problem, or point someone in the right direction. Although maps shape and communicate information for the sake of improved orientation, they serve nation-states as well as individuals and need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book. Mapping Europe's Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in Eastern Europe and presents them innovatively through the prism of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from cartographic sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the east central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. His concluding chapter considers the effect of the diverse regional and socioeconomic backgrounds of the mapmakers as well as their education, experience, and choice of language.

Mapping Europe's Borderlands deals with the situation in Europe from the eighteenth century through the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In its interdisciplinary framework, the book advances the seminal scholarship of Harley and Woodward by incorporating recent contributions in political geography and critical cartography. Seegel acknowledges advances in the structured history of images and the history of nationalities and draws on new scholarship in both imperial history and spatial histories that focus on the visual turn toward studies of landscape. He also looks at how the history of cartography intersected with Europe's early modern dynastic states and with intellectual and political currents of imperialism and nationalism in the nineteenth century. In a critical assessment of impacts, he examines how mapped populations in empires and nations structured borders, negotiated frontiers, and protested the territorial confinement imposed by Europe's maps.

In applying Harley's theory and rhetoric to the borderlands of east central Europe, Seegel shows how governments used cartography broadly as a means of control, first to conquer and then to engineer territorial space. Maps, encyclopedias, and atlases were tools of imperial governance whereby states exerted structured visual control over specific territories. Diverse applications include census maps to assess demographic variation and implement policies toward language and religion, in particular the various confessions of Christianity, such as Russian Orthodox and Uniat Catholic; topographic and military maps to delineate boundaries, craft governable provinces, and stifle separatism; engineering maps to plan and build roads and railways; and economic maps to identify and exploit natural resources. In addition to noting cartography's role in economic development, Seegel emphasizes the map's importance as a political instrument in imperial Russia and its eastern borderlands. In particular, he calls attention to the conflicting territorial imaginaries and political truth claims found in every nineteenth-century topographic and thematic map produced in these contested spaces. He argues that labeling by nationality and religion was used not only to assert cultural rights or autonomy, but also to ward off imperial decline, impose a sense of identity in the era before passports, and otherwise perpetuate state control over territory. Taxonomies based on classifications of race and ethnicity that developed before World War I indicate the extent to which maps preceded annexationist interventions, state projects of territorial engineering, and the assertion of geopolitical claims in imagined frontiers to lebensraum or “historical” lands. In much the same way that nineteenth-century states needed accurate maps for governance and development, architects of nation-state projects needed maps as political weapons to rewrite history.

The book takes pains to apply the fundamental question “What are maps for?” to European borderlands. According to Seegel, the nostalgic collector and the statesman shared a common interest in maps not only as a discourse of progress so characteristic of nineteenth-century history and spatial science, but also as a romantic fantasy about the past held by nation-states and empire builders. Moreover, the scholarly cartographic project that arose to form national libraries, build state archives with map collections, and gather and treat maps as historical sources was grounded in nineteenth-century nation- and state-building efforts and the related discourses of historical difference. Seegel argues that critical geography and cartography show the extent to which maps of all thematic varieties could be used and abused to claim and control lands and exclude others.

The author concedes several points about progress in geography and cartography. In particular, he acknowledges significant advances before World War I in topographic mapping, statistics, geology, geomorphology, hypsometry, hydrology, transport and communications, and urban planning. In the realm of map design and production, cartographers using chromolithography and other advanced copying techniques, and eventually photography and photogrammetry, contributed to human betterment and the advancement of science. Mapmakers who were professionally trained mathematicians, astronomers, geodesists, or engineers planned and built roads, canals, settlements, cities, parks, and fortifications, often from scratch. In addition, cartographers assured the development of the state's infrastructure, the rationalization of its territory, the systematization of its archived knowledge, and the development of its commerce and economy. In these endeavors, scientific cooperation between geographers and cartographers took the form of international congresses and conferences, with invitations given out by geographic societies and institutions of higher learning, and other forms of cordial communication and scholarly exchange of ideas.

In outlining how cartographers constructed truth claims, the book carefully considers the actual perimeters of nineteenth-century east central European borderlands. For example, in referring to Poland-Lithuania, rather than simply Poland, Seegel means the lands of the dual Polish Kingdom and Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that is, the “Republic of Both Nations, Polish and Lithuanian” (Rzeczpospolita obojga narodow, polskiego i litewskiego), legally formed by the 1569 Union of Lublin, with borders adjusted to the moment before its 1772 partition by the Habsburg dynasty, the Russian Empire, and Brandenburg-Prussia. When referring to Ukraine, he respects the territorial integrity of its post-Communist borders, established at its independence in 1991, and considers not only its early modern status as a borderland (rather than a territorialized modern nation-state) but also the fluidity of the Hetmanate's frontiers at the crossroads of four (Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Polish-Lithuanian) empires. The boundary of Ukraine ranges from the Carpathian Mountains and its borders with Romania and Moldova to the southwest; with Hungary, the Slovak Republic, and Poland to the west; and with Belarus to the north, Russia to the north and east, and the Black Sea, Crimea, and the Sea of Azov to the south.

Seegel's research methodology is grounded in early twenty-first-century viewpoints, such as increased skepticism of the revival of grand narratives at the end of the Cold War and awareness that U.S. “imperial” exceptionalism had lost the moral high ground. Although both fascinated by and wary of the relative success of the European Union and the new “harmonious maps” it produced, he was tempted to advance a new European e pluribus unum [Out of many, one] ideology—a multicultural or perhaps even an Imperial Europe of Nations. In this vein, Mapping Europe's Borderlands focuses most of its attention not on the nation, which the author treats as borderless and diasporic, but on state institutions and the geographic knowledge and cultures of mapping that states produced and into which policies were grounded. Appropriately the book includes “obituaries” for numerous defunct states: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, also known as the Republic of Both Nations, Polish and Lithuanian (1569–1795), and consisting of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the Cossack Hetmanate (1654–1773); the Russian Empire (1721–1917), which had absorbed Muscovy; the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1813); the Congress Kingdom of Poland (1815–31); the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918); the German Empire (1871–1918); the Habsburg monarchy (1276–1918), which ruled the official Austrian Empire (1804–1867) and later Austria-Hungary (1867–1918); and the numerous Ukrainian governments during Russia's Revolutionary War (1917–1921).

The book combines criticism of cartographic sources of information with the skeptical approaches of critical geography and the critical cartographic turn that emerged after the untimely death in 1991 of Brian Harley, a pioneering figure in the international history of cartography. Methodologically, Seegel challenges Harley's assumptions that power and protest (i.e., speaking truth to power) are binary opposites and that the ontological truth of a map can be known only if it is stripped of its ideology; that is, its political agenda or aestheticized mode of representation. Although initially inspired by Harley, Seegel became intrigued by maps when discourses in the history of cartography and cultural studies became intermingled with the formidable postmodern critique of conventional historicist practices.

The book owes much to Seegel's seeking out and carefully reading cartographic texts. Principal sources for his research were military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps; geographic texts; and related cartographic literature. Research for the book was conducted principally in libraries, state archives, museums, and private collections in Cambridge (Massachusetts), Krakow, Kiev, L'viv, Milwaukee, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Urbana-Champaign, Vienna, Vilnius, Washington, DC., Warsaw, and Wrocław. In Poland and Ukraine, sadly, many archives had been looted, and maps were stolen, destroyed, resold, or hopelessly lost. Moreover, some of the Russian and Soviet maps were held in closed archives until 1991. This research led Seegel to argue that post-Communist scholarship on the history of mapping by nation-states in Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Lithuania tends not only to fall into national schools but also to embrace the nineteenth-century notion of linear progress in geographic knowledge, as evidenced by important advances in geodesic science during the Soviet period and by international cooperation in geography and cartography. Seegel also argues that the transmission of geographic knowledge from “Europe” into “European Russia” offered the government at St. Petersburg an orderly vision of its dominions and that the newly drawn Russian-language maps and atlases served as reformist tools of rational governmentality. Alternative models of territoriality that would have afforded greater Polish autonomy were suppressed after the Decembrist revolt in 1825, and again after the first failed Polish uprising of 1830–1833.

In discussing this period, Seegel largely ignores an important event in the history of Polish and Russian cartography, namely, the joint Polish–Russian geographical and topographic project that surveyed and compiled the Three-verst map of the Kingdom of Poland (karta Królestwa Polskiego/Carte topographique du Royaume de Pologne; scale 1:126,000), which had been published by the Headquarters of the Acting Army in Poland (in sixty sheets plus one sheet with an index map), and which many European cartographers consider on the same level of perfection as the best published European maps of that time. This map was the result of a joint project carried out from 1815 to 1839 by officers of the Polish Quartermasters Corps and Russian topographers of the General Staff under General Major Karol Richter ().

The surveys of the Polish Kingdom fostered a transfer of knowledge from France to Russia insofar as the Russian mapping professionals acquired a deeper understanding of the methods and traditions of the French school from the Polish topographers, who had been educated earlier in the practices of French military engineers—methods that the Russians had first encountered after the French Revolution (1789–1799) when some aristocrat engineer-geographers (topographers) emigrated to Russia and joined the General Staff of the Russian Army. Later, during the European campaign of the Russian Army against Napoleon I (1813–1815), captured French maps and instruments afforded Russian officers intensive experience in French survey reconnaissance methods.

The Three-verst map of the Kingdom of Poland was published in 1843 in Polish with 1839 as the date of publication. In one of the first Polish publications about this map Krassowski (1978) misstated the 1815 starting date of the surveys as 1822. In addition to this map, Polish and Russian topographers and geographers also compiled fourteen manuscript volumes of geographical descriptions of the country's nature and population (in Polish) and the first thematic atlas of Poland (in Russian), which included detailed descriptions of forests, soils, geology, population, religion, education, and other characteristics of natural resources and human activities of the Kingdom. Now kept at the Russian State Military History Archives in Moscow, these manuscript materials demonstrate a rare example of Polish–Russian cooperation in the geographical exploration and mapping of the Polish Kingdom. These materials had been studied by Polish and Russian researchers as part of the joint project of the Polish National Academy and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. My colleagues and I wanted to publish these materials, but the turmoil of the 1990s undermined our plans. Even so, some results of our research were presented at international conferences and subsequently published (e.g., Postnikov and Babicz 1989), but Seegel, although mentioning one book in his references, paid no attention to our project. It is unfortunate for map historians who might rely on Mapping Europe's Borderlands that Seegel did not explore the Polish emigrants' use of the Three-verst map of the Kingdom of Poland as a compilation source. Our research proves that although this printed map had not been freely distributed, it could be obtained outside Russia.

I hope that I have succeeded in illuminating the many excellent features of Seegel's book, which reflects thorough research on the political geography of the three European Empires as well as the history of geopolitics, ethnicity, and power struggles in their borderlands. His special aim has been to show how all these aspects were reflected in, and in many cases influenced by, maps compiled by cartographers and politicians representing conflicting national and state interests. Although the main title of the book—Mapping Europe's Borderlands—is fully appropriate, Seegal's work on the history of cartography is sometimes not very precise. I pointed out earlier that he did not discuss the very important joint Russian–Polish mapping and geographical project linked to the surveys and compilation of the Topographic Map of the Polish Kingdom, the related geographical descriptions, and the thematic atlas of the country (1815–1842). Besides this omission, Seegel made some mistakes in his outline of the history of Russian cartography in the eighteenth century. For instance, he tells us that “When the General Land survey [of Russia was] begun in 1766, it was conducted primarily by the army and internal ministries, modeled largely on de L'Isle's proposals and Cassini's survey in France” (pp. 34, 72). This is wrong because de L'Isle's and Cassini's ideas and methods based on triangulation control for maps were not used by Russian civil (i.e., nonmilitary) land surveyors in the eighteenth century. Although the official history of Russian military topography might be traced to the founding of the General Staff of the Army (1763), the military did not participate in the land surveys. Moreover, Russian military topography was based on different principles (triangulation and surveys with use of plane table), which were really developed between the end of the eighteenth century (1799) and beginning of the nineteenth century (1812–1822), as Seegel tells us in some detail.

Seegel argues that the collections of the Załuski Library, purloined by Russians in 1775, were “partially” restored to Poland by the Soviet Union per the settlements of the 1921 Treaty of Riga. His assertion of only partial restoration of Polish map collections in 1921 needs to be supported by positive evidence insofar as, according to inventories of Russian archives and libraries, all of these materials were transferred to Poland with the exception of some second copies of maps, atlases, and descriptions compiled with participation of Russian cartographers. Perhaps Seegal did not know of, or was reluctant to mention, the tragic fate of these collections during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Nazis, after crushing the Poles, set ablaze all books, maps, and manuscripts of the National Library of Poland, which originated from the Załuski Library and other Warsaw depositaries (Knuth 2006, 166).

A brief comment about the book's illustrations is in order. Although the color plates are adequately informative, the majority of the black-and-white facsimile reproductions are either too severely reduced in size or too poorly representative of the original color artwork to be usefully informative to readers. That said, I congratulate Seegel for his outstanding achievement. I am sure that his book will be a starting point for many other researchers and a stimulus for further work on the complex histories of European ethnic, national, and state boundaries and their mapping.