Click to enlargeMappa geogr. Indiæ Orients eller geogr. charta öfver Ostindien
A small map of the East Indies from the Atlas Juvenilis, a Swedish school atlas engraved by Anders Åkerman for the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala. It shows the surveyed image of India trickling down, within a generation, into the Northern European schoolroom.
Authorship and object
Anders Åkerman (d. 1778), a Swedish engraver and globe-maker, produced the Atlas Juvenilis — "geographical charts for the service of youth" — for the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala; this is the posthumous second edition of 1789. A small hand-coloured plate at very small scale.
A teaching map
Made for instruction rather than reference, the map reduces the subcontinent to its essentials for young readers, with relief shown pictorially. Its geography descends from the up-to-date Anglo-French models of the day.
The gaze
Here India has become curriculum. That a Swedish schoolbook of the 1780s carried a tidy map of "Ostindien" shows how thoroughly the European image of the subcontinent had standardised and spread — known, by now, not only to merchants and surveyors but to Uppsala schoolchildren.