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A "Geographical, Historical, and Statistical Map of India" from the first American edition of Lavoisne's historical atlas — the surveyed map pressed into pedagogical service, its margins crowded with the chronology of conquest. India as a lesson in history and statistics, now taught in Philadelphia.
Authorship and object
Published by Mathew Carey & Son in Philadelphia in 1820 — the first American edition of Lavoisne's Genealogical, Historical, Chronological and Geographical Atlas, after the 1817 London edition. Full colour, the sheet surrounding the map with descriptive and statistical text.
Map as textbook
This is a thematic-historical map: the geography is a frame for tabulated history. Battles and sieges are listed chronologically and keyed by little flags to their sites — the military history of the British conquest plotted directly onto the land.
The gaze
The map treats India as an object of study — its past narrated, its conquests enumerated, its statistics tabled for an American readership with no direct stake in it. The surveyed subcontinent has become a chapter in a general history of the world, the violence of its subjugation rendered as orderly chronological lists.