Südost-Asien

A commercial-school atlas

V. F. Klun, a professor of geography and statistics, and Henry Lange prepared the atlas for commercial schools, merchants and industrial readers. The Brockhaus cartographic establishment engraved the sheet for publication by E. Ernst.

Products and connections

The map’s subject is not merely political territory. It belongs to an atlas concerned with exports, industry, communications and commercial comparison. India appears within a broader Asian economic system rather than as the sole centre of attention.

A continental European view

The sheet demonstrates that the analytic mapping of colonial economies was not confined to British official cartography. German-speaking educational and commercial institutions also treated distant regions as systems of resources and exchange to be studied methodically.

The gaze

This is the economic gaze in pedagogical form. The region becomes intelligible through what it produces and how goods move—the land abstracted into the categories required by commerce.