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Click to enlargeTome V. No. 49. Pag. 129. Carte nouvelle des terres de Cucan, de Canara, de Malabar, de Madura
A map of the southern Indian coasts — Konkan, Canara, Malabar, Madurai and Coromandel — from the Atlas Historique, accompanied by descriptive text and a table of the trading posts held by the Dutch and other European companies. The commercial gaze made explicit: India indexed by its factories.
Authorship and object
From the same Chatelain Atlas Historique (Amsterdam, with Gueudeville's text). The sheet pairs a regional map of peninsular India with a printed table cataloguing the comptoirs — the trading establishments, especially Dutch, strung along the coasts.
A map for the company age
Its subject is precisely the coastal belt where the European East India companies operated, and the accompanying table reads the shoreline as a ledger of factories and ports. Geography here serves commerce directly: the worth of the land lies in its harbours and its establishments.
The gaze
This is India seen through the company account-book. Map and table together treat the subcontinent's southern rim as a network of trading stations to be enumerated and compared — the mercantile logic of the age rendered cartographically, a generation before that commerce hardened into territorial rule.