Catherine Gibson's Geographies of Nationhood represents a stimulating contribution to a growing body of research dealing with the cultural history of cartography. The book is a study of what the author calls the “ethnographic mapping” of the Baltic regions of the Russian empire, from the mid-nineteenth century to the Treaty of Versailles. It is organized chronologically around a core of five chapters, each of which offers a highly detailed examination of a particular map or series of maps. The particular selection of maps she has assembled is decidedly heterogeneous. They were produced variously by scientific bodies in the imperial center, provincial administrators, local mapmakers, military and political authorities based in western Europe, and even by ordinary farmers providing rough pencil sketches of their farmlands. Throughout the work, Gibson takes a constructivist approach. She seeks to unpack how the maps in question shaped the particular interests, biases, and agendas of their creators, and how they were deployed as part of broader political projects concerned in different ways with the ethnic landscape of the Baltic region. The maps take us through a succession of these projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from enlightened imperial administration through Russification, Pan-Germanism, indigenous Baltic nationalism, and culminating finally with the Wilsonian “map-men” who after World War I were determined to establish self-determination in Europe by using ethnographic criteria as the basis for national boundaries.
Gibson approaches the production of cartographic knowledge through a forensic reconstruction of the mapmaking process itself: who exactly were the mapmakers, what technologies did they use, and how were the maps assembled, published, and distributed. She provides a wealth of information regarding the practice of cartography, revealing the extent to which it was entangled with the personal lives of the mapmakers, their professional aspirations, and their financial circumstances. In some cases, map-making was a domestic enterprise that involved other family members, and Gibson highlights, among other things, the contributions made by women in the household to the production of maps—something that the history of cartography has tended to overlook. She details technical innovations such as choropleth mapping with nuanced shading patterns or isogloss lines demarcating distinctive linguistic regions, and shows how these revolutionized the way in which ethnographic data could be represented. This is all part of unpacking the semiotics of maps design and demonstrating how color schemes, scale, and cartographic symbols could be manipulated to advance contending narratives about the ethno-political realities and relationships in the regions concerned. Of particular interest was her discussion of the late nineteenth century diversification of cartographic print culture and the expansion of “cartographic literacy” (175), as maps increasing appeared in newspapers and illustrated journals.
Gibson's constructivist position that maps are to be seen essentially as imaginaries bearing no more than a “veneer of objectivity” (105) is a common one for historians of cartography. She pushes the point significantly further, however, with the argument that maps played what was effectively a proactive role in the shaping of national identities. Rather than trying to describe a reality, mapmakers sought to create one: they “used their maps to construct compelling cartographic narratives to persuade their audiences of how to see, think—and ultimately act—with respect to the Baltic provinces” (94). The result, she suggests, was a territorialized way of thinking about nationality, one in which maps “streamlined hybrid, multifaceted and fluid forms of identification into a neat mosaic of national spaces” (218). This argument for an activist cartography, it might be noted, would seem to rest on an essential paradox: the consumers of maps could be influenced by them only to the extent that their imaginary essence was masked and that they were accepted instead as what they purported to be (but were not), namely full and accurate pictures of the real world.
There is some unevenness in Gibson's account. Although the subject of her study is ethnographic mapping, she does not describe exactly what the ethnicity she has in mind is supposed to be. She appropriately refers to ethnicity's fluid nature, which can be understood variously in terms of language, culture, appearance, or genealogy, but in a study dedicated to the graphic representation of ethnicity this semantic fluidity needs to be more consistently and carefully managed. Indeed, as her account makes very clear, ethnographic mapping as such could mean very different things for different actors at different times. She amplifies this terminological uncertainty by referring throughout the book to “nationality” and “nationhood,” with no real guidance provided as to how—if at all—these concepts are supposed to differ from ethnography and ethnicity.
Notwithstanding these considerations, Geographies of Nationhood is a meticulously researched and highly original study, presented in an engagingly-written text. It will be of great value to anyone interested in maps and the politics of identity in the final decades of the Russian empire.
