Colonial Vestiges on the Map: A Rhetorical History of Development Cartography at the United Nations during Post-War Decolonization

ABSTRACT

In 1948, the United Nations set a resolution affirming the centrality of cartography to its plans for world development in its member nations. Following that resolution, the UN established a cartographic office, regular publications, and most importantly, a program of regional conferences that would begin in “Asia and the Far East” in 1955 and would start in Africa in 1963. This essay offers a rhetorical history of the UN’s early attempts to create technical assistance and exchange programs for mapping in the 1950s and 1960s. The argument is that UN development cartography articulated a tension between an idealistic, scientific internationalism with more national security concerns, amidst a backdrop of colonial histories and emerging superpower influence. Such influences speak to the ways decolonizing nations adopted the rhetorical forms, like maps, of the so-called developed nations, and faced the inequities and asymmetries of development discourse.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Ned O’Gorman and the reviewers for their helpful edits, and Trevor Parry-Giles for his invaluable advice. He would also like to thank the archivists who assisted this project at the United Nations Archives in New York City.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For some of the best starting points on the links between colonialism, cartography, and national identity, see Edney (1997) and Godlewska and Smith (1994).

2. For some international perspectives on state-building and the limits of cartography, see especially Karen Culcasi’s (2017) chapter on post-colonial mapping in Egypt, and Sarah A. Radcliffe’s (2001) tracing of the Ecuadorian state through cartography.

3. David Zarefsky is often a starting point for definitions of rhetorical history. He has noted that doing rhetorical history allows us to “articulate the rhetorical climate of an age: how people defined the situation, what led them to seek to justify themselves or to persuade others” and “what storehouse of social knowledge they drew upon for their premises….” (1998, 31–32).

4. For example, see both Pearce (2001) and Barney (2015) for reflections on the rhetoric of development, although largely from a US and Cold War perspective.

5. The concept of development has an important colonial and even liberal history. It goes far back as an Enlightenment idea that draws on the activist project of the North to “civilize” the South, and thus served the colonial project well. See Cooper (2010) for an important overview. Mark Duffield (2007) writes of how development more broadly became “a liberal strategization of power and tutelage that has a viral ability to reinvent itself, allowing it to leap institutions and act across generations” (231).

6. The links between colonialism and postwar development should not be misconstrued as revealing that the colonial powers left their colonized in ready shape for the so-called modern world – in fact, as Nigerian historian D.I. Ajaegbo has written, “colonialism served as an instrument for the underdevelopment of Africa” (1986, 2).

7. Joseph Manzione (2000) traces the roots of scientific internationalism, and provides a useful starting definition: “At its core were a set of ecumenical traditions and ideals common to the scientific profession: that scientific knowledge was universally valuable, that the methods and practice of science must remain unaffected by culture or politics, that unrestricted scientific exchange among professionals of all nations or peoples was critical to the progress of science and human civilization, and that science itself was a lingua franca that promoted a cosmopolitan perspective, unified goals, and an order based on merit that crossed international boundaries” (23–4). Specifically in the context of post-WWII, scientific internationalism envisioned a future that “could be based on cooperation among nations and peoples, obligating scientists to become diplomats, passing over old borders with gifts of technology and a wealth of material and educational solutions that all could appreciate” (28).

8. Geography itself, according to James Sidaway, “is inescapably marked (both philosophically and institutionally) by its location … as a western-colonial science” (2000, 593). Cartography, by extension, is also bound up as a colonial practice – its very identity stems from its value as a consolidation of space for order and classification. J.B. Harley has written that “There are innumerable contexts in which maps became the currency of political ‘bargains,’ leases, partitions, sales, and treaties struck over colonial territory and, once made permanent in the image, these maps more than often acquired the force of law in the landscape” (2002, 59). This power created a cartographic rhetoric marked by the veneer of scientific transparency, even as it (often violently) produced a colonized landscape. For Graham Huggan, “The exemplary role of cartography in the demonstration of colonial discursive practices can be identified in a series of key rhetorical strategies implemented in the production of the map, such as the re-inscription, enclosure, and hierarchization of space, which provide an analogue for the acquisition, management and reinforcement of colonial power” (1989, 115). In many ways the map was the preeminent technology and discourse of colonial power.

9. For more on the vantage point from “above” and its modern consequences, see Kaplan (2018).

10. In a 1951 report entitled, “Measures for the Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries,” a group of experts sought to define the parameters of development in the UN system. At one point, the report notes, “Economic progress will not be desired in a community where the people do not realize [sic] that progress is possible. Progress occurs only where people believe that man can, by conscious effort, master nature. This is a lesson which the human mind has been a long time learning. Where it has been learnt, human beings are experimental in their attitude to material techniques, to social institutions, and so on. This experimental or scientific attitude is one of the preconditions of progress” (UN Department of Economic Affairs 1951, 13). The UN report also goes on to note the kind of upheaval these new attitudes toward progress would require: “There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful readjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to be burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated” (15). Two notable critical development scholars – the anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2012, 4) and the geographer David Slater (1993, 422) – have noted this same passage as evidence of the “progressivist” veneer of development.

11. The U.S. colonization of the Philippines saw the violent appropriation and mapping of indigenous space under the guise of American exceptionalist rhetorics and geographies that needed to be presented as progressive and anticolonial (Kirsch 2011, 216). Such discourse would prove influential on the UN system later on. Similarly, by the end of WWI, the Wilsonian idealism of self-determination rested uneasily alongside the urge to draw boundaries around emerging states that would benefit powers like the United States. The Paris Peace Conference, particularly through the work of Wilson’s geographic expert Isaiah Bowman, envisioned such a world through its Black Book maps (which primarily focused on European partitions), but also through the Red Book maps (which focused on the colonial world). Out of these came a mandate system that would eventually inspire the establishment of the UN’s Trust Territories in the wake of World War II (Reisser 2012, 38–40). Bowman would also engage in regional and national profiles of the geographies of developing nations in his post-Paris Peace Conference bestseller The New World, which combined a “principled rejection of imperialism” with “a nascent developmental paternalism concerning colonies and ‘backward’ areas” (Smith 2003, 187). This kind of modern and liberal geography would also be part of the United Nations’ vision of development, of which Bowman played an important role. And by World War II, America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA) was producing voluminous amounts of geographic and cartographic information about the global South. The OSS’s Joint Army Navy Intelligence Surveys (later to become the CIA World Factbook) were being revised to focus more sharply on geographical expertise and now required “area specialists” (Barnes and Crampton 2011, 240). The so-called developing nations were being mapped as sites of surveillance that could be gazed upon synoptically for development and national security purposes. So, in this sense, development rhetoric was an important link between colonialism and the emergent post-WWII liberal internationalism.

12. For two important works on the prevalence of colonial logics and rhetorics today, see Gregory (2004) and Stoler (2016).