Hindoostan

Authorship and object

Published by Charles DeSilver in Philadelphia in S. A. Mitchell's New Universal Atlas (1857), in full colour, with an inset of the Ganges delta and the prime meridian at Greenwich.

Classification by status

The map's distinguishing feature is its legend of political status — separate lists of British territory, British possessions and independent states — colour-coding the subcontinent by who controlled it. It is India parsed as a political ledger.

The gaze

Issued in 1857, the year of the great Rebellion, Mitchell's map shows how thoroughly India had become a standard subject even of American atlases — and how naturally that subject was organised around the categories of British rule. The interest is administrative and classificatory: the country known by sorting it into degrees of imperial control.