Hindoostan

Authorship and object

Engraved and published by Sidney Hall in his New General Atlas (London, 1827), "constructed entirely from new drawings." Outline colour, relief by hachures.

The settled British image

Hall's map reflects the consolidated post-Rennell picture of India — accurate in outline, administratively organised, free of the older decoration. It is fine commercial cartography of a kind Britain now led, the survey's results presented as clean, authoritative reference.

The gaze

By the 1820s India had become, for the British atlas-reader, a known and orderly possession — drawn with confidence, divided and labelled, the labour of survey assumed rather than announced. The map's very plainness is a statement: this is settled knowledge of a settled dominion.