Click to enlargeComposite: (North and South) This Newly Constructed Map of India From The Latest Surveys of the best Authorities
John Walker's Newly Constructed and Extended Map of India from the Latest Surveys — published by the East India Company's booksellers expressly "for the use of the Officers of the Army in India." The survey map openly declared as an instrument of military government.
Authorship and object
Compiled by John Walker and published in London by Parbury, Allen & Co. (booksellers to the East India Company); a large multi-sheet map at about 1:2,217,600, relief by hachures, with an inset of the Burmese Empire "compiled chiefly from native information." First issued by James Wyld in 1827, with later editions to 1844.
Drawn from the surveys, made for the army
The map gathers "the latest surveys of the best authorities" — by 1831 a vast and growing body of Company survey work — and frames the whole subcontinent for practical military use, its roads and routes foremost.
The gaze
Its dedication says it outright: this is a map for the officers of the army in India. Where the room began with Rennell measuring a country to know it, it arrives here at the map as a tool of the garrison — the surveyed subcontinent handed to the army that governed it. The reliance on "native information" for Burma also quietly registers the indigenous knowledge the survey absorbed and effaced.