After the Map - Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century - Grand Format

"In this tour de force study, Rankin maps mapping, demonstrating just how radically the global map evolved over the long twentieth century. He brings us from the 1890s, when treaties produced the first true global map system, through the military grids that marked every spot for building, digging, and targeting. Finally, Rankin displays, in a fresh new way, how we have come to move in a pointillist, instrument-ready GPS world-the third great moment of modern world mapping.
Map may not be territory, but with After the Map, Rankin shows us how mapping has remade contemporary territory and reconfigured the political geography of space itself." Peter Galison, Harvard University. "How do we place ourselves in space ? Do we imagine large, contiguous territories or isolated points on a grid ? Rankin traces three waves of geographic knowledge making over the twentieth century.
Forged or foiled by wars and treaties, technological capabilities, navigational imperatives, and cartographic imaginations, each mapping scheme reflected shifting notions of how best to find our place in the world. After the Map is profoundly researched and utterly fascinating." David Kaiser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "After the Map is as prodigiously capacious and groundbreaking as the successive representations of the world that it recounts.
It not only traces the progression since the late nineteenth century from terrain-based maps, through location by latitude-and-longitude-free grids, to orientation by points in GPS space, but it also convincingly analyzes what drove these cartographic shifts, spotlighting the dynamic interplay among technical knowledge and practices, military and navigational needs, and changing ideas of territory and sovereignty.
Deeply researched and lucidly written, After the Map is an important, eye-opening, and compelling work." Daniel Kevles, Yale University.