2 - The British Cartographic Imagination and Palestine

Summary

Maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world.

Brian Harley 2001:53

All the state simplifications … have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the map-maker and to ignore the rest.

James C. Scott 1998:87

In this chapter we take a detour into the world of cartography, to follow the underlying principles behind the British Mandatory administration's use of maps prior to the emergence of a state in Palestine. In Seeing like a State James C. Scott explains why and how states strive to simplify and make legible their domain. The same logic applies to imperial and mandatory powers, perhaps with even greater force. At the heart of this process, which he names “high modernism,” “was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws” (1998:90). High-modernist states adopted a synoptic, interest-oriented view, which reached a peak with projects such as the Soviet collectivization scheme and Nyerere's compulsory villagization in Tanzania. The taming of forests in Europe and the move to commercial monoculture was also part of this process: measurements were standardized, minimum diversity was a target, plants were understood as either crops or weeds, and trees meant timber.