Room 07

Last Frontiers

At the end of the collection the European gaze reaches its limits. The remaining maps look toward the strategic frontier, the wartime public and the hurried end of empire: Central Asia as margin, India compressed for a newspaper audience, Portuguese enclaves counted from Lisbon, and alternative partition boundaries examined before the states they would divide had come into being. The 1947 panorama is an epilogue — the imperial boundary-making process after it had become a lived catastrophe on both sides.