Symbolic tools represent, organize, and transform our knowledge of objects and events. The acquisition and internalization of symbolic tools change the way we think about the world. Different cultural subgroups use different symbolic tools and as a result, they shape their cognitive processes, even those as basic as spatial memory, differently. Moreover, some of the psychological functions that at the first glance should progress developmentally irrespective of the person’s experience actually depend on the acquisition and mastery of specific tools, for example, the graphic representation of objects. Even in societies with formal educational systems, the teaching of symbolic tools as tools is often neglected. Tables, graphs, and formulae appear as a part of the content material instead of being learned as specific tools. Many of the problem-solving mistakes made by students, for example in international exams such as PISA and TIMMS, reflect their poor mastery of symbolic tools rather than a lack of curricular knowledge. Educational interventions aimed at teaching students how to identify and apply the instrumental properties of symbolic tools lead to improved problem-solving in subjects ranging from mathematics to foreign language learning.

The Mongols facilitated a great deal of Sino-Islamic scientific exchange. Though scholars patronized by the Mongols learned a great deal about developments on the other side of the Mongol realms, science from China did not affect the theoretical foundations of science in Iran, nor vice versa. Rather, materia medica and co-operation in observational astronomy endured. The western Mongol realms also greeted scholars from Europe and from the Islamic west. The Mongols were principally interested in specific benefits accruing to them from scientific exchanges. Thus they welcomed information about medicine, mapmaking, astronomy, and astrology, and supported exchanges in these fields.

The chapter focusses on post-1721 developments, analysing the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s struggle to fit the new observations he made in Greenland into the framework of established ideas promoted in the texts he had read prior to his arrival. The transition from reading about Greenland in books to observing the land in situ led to a crisis of representation as the archive of knowledge that had been stored up over the centuries became difficult to reconcile with experience. The most significant error perpetuated in several texts was the idea that the Eastern Settlement was located on the east coast. Rather than dismiss the many expeditions that sought to reach this fabled settlement as irrelevant to the colonial project that eventually developed on the west coast, the chapter proposes that the search for the settlers and their resource-rich lands is significant for understanding Denmark’s political, religious, and commercial ambitions in Greenland. Attention is also paid to the maps Egede drew of Greenland as they are visual records of how traditional perceptions were allowed to coexist with new empirical data.

The chapter examines the rhetoric of imperialism in the period leading up to the Danish recolonisation of Greenland in 1721 (and its immediate aftermath). English privateer Martin Frobisher’s expeditions in the late sixteenth century first gave impetus to the search for riches in the Arctic. The slew of texts published in the wake of Frobisher’s expeditions provided the nation with the image of courageous Englishmen establishing claims to lands in the North Atlantic. The chapter analyses English writings that allude to Greenland in ways that constitute claims to land. However, these claims were not uncontested. The Danish crown sent out expeditions in the early seventeenth century, which were also documented in the medium of print. It is the aim to show how Danish endeavours can be seen partly as a response to English activity. A significant part of the chapter is therefore an inquiry into how Danish writers attempted to ascertain Greenland as a land belonging to the Dano-Norwegian crown.

Human history has created a large variety of sign systems for communication. These systems were developed at different times for different purposes. While oral language has developed as part of human biological evolution, written texts, realistic pictures, maps, and graphs are cultural inventions. Human oral language might have originated from gestures supplemented by sound patterns. It is a biological anchored feature of the human species, as manifested in somatic, perceptual, and neurological pre-adaptations. Early writing systems used iconic ideograms which were gradually transformed into symbols. This made production and discrimination easier but increased the required amount of learning. Further development led to writing systems using phonograms plus orthographic ideograms. Realistic pictures are older than writing systems. They represent content by similarity but also show allegories of social relationships. Maps are realistic pictures of a geographic area facing the problem of how to present a curved earth surface on a two-dimensional surface. Graphs are visuo-spatial objects representing a subject matter based on analogy due to inherent common structural properties.

Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

Mary Pat Brady’s chapter poses an alternative approach to hemispheric fiction by reading not according the scales of concentric geometries of space (local, regional, national, transnational), but instead reconceptualizing what she terms “pluriversal novels of the 21st century.” She argues for attending to the complexly mixed temporalities, perspectives, and languages of novels that reject the dualism of monoworlds (center/periphery) for the unpredictability of stories anchored in multiple space-times. While this is not an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon, she shows that pluriveral fiction has flourished recently, as works by Linda Hogan, Jennine Capó Crucet, Julia Alvarez, Gabby Rivera, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Evelina Zuni Lucero demonstrate.

This essay develops a literary history of the concept “world” in the early modern period, suggesting that particular literary strategies—speculation, scalar juxtaposition, allegory, philology, and lexical play—became integral to imagining, naming, and shaping a particular vision of “world” across a range of media. Through a comparative study of European and South Asian examples, it shows how worldmaking literature in the early modern period can be characterized by “cartographic poesis,” that is, an intent to shape and represent the idea “world,” to bring it into being as a coherent concept and category. It further explores words for “world” and their significations across a range of languages and cultural contexts, highlighting how literature may be a crucial resource for envisioning ideas of global totality.

The second chapter draws on material from numerous colonial archives to examine the rationale behind initial British attempts to create a borderline through the northwestern Himalaya. These attempts, taking place as they did in a region where only border points had previously existed, were rooted in efforts to systematically read the landscape and transcribe it onto paper using generalized principles–principles that came to symbolize a growing sense that, for the empire, geography was destiny. The watershed, in particular, emerged as the ideal border-making object. In theory, these general border-making principles were meant to mitigate territorial disputes and to establish clear lines of sovereignty for the empire. But as this chapter shows, the determining and drawing of boundary lines was a task fraught with unexpected divisions and contradictions, both geographical and political. Despite surveys that revealed shifting limits of the Indus watershed, British administrators sought to apply the “water-parting principle” to their desired border through Ladakh and across most of the 1,500-mile long Himalayan range. Their ongoing failure to successfully “border” the Himalaya was primarily the result of ongoing tensions between ideas of natural frontiers and strategic ones–two frontiers ostensibly unified by the logic of the so-called scientific frontier.

This chapter investigates the emergence of imperial space in the early Islamic world, 7th–12th centuries, and Muslim notions of empire in this period. It examines how an imperial space was conquered under the Prophet Muhammad, Rashidun Caliphs and Umayyad dynasty, reaching its height in c.740, followed by its fragmentation under the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). The role of jihad in this expansion is examined, along with the institutions that bound the empire together and the reasons for its disintegration. The expansion of the frontiers of the Islamic world only began again under Turkish dynasties, the Seljuqs, Qarakhanids and Ghaznavids in the 11th century, when parts of Anatolia, Central Asia and India were conquered. Finally, this chapter considers how imperial space was visualised and represented in this period, examining the evidence of maps in manuscripts of works by Arabic geographers of the 10th–11th centuries.

This chapter explores the gulf that existed in British India between theories of linear boundaries and unitary sovereign territory on the one hand, and precarious practices of bordering on the other. It analyses three distinct periods of bordering common to the northwest and northeast frontiers. In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials sought to instantiate partially porous borders that would provide security while allowing themselves freedom of action in frontier regions. The limitations of these schemes led to a widespread flurry of bordering in the 1860s and 1870s led by administrators ‘on the spot’. Much of this activity contradicted orders from superiors, and took the form of breaking existing boundaries as well as instantiating new ones. A third period, around the turn of the twentieth century, saw heightened attention to international boundaries. These borders remained fragmented and limited. They also had disruptive effects on internal boundaries, reopening questions over where the frontier began.

Nineteenth-century Europeans developed scientific methodologies that generated new knowledge about Africa through Eurocentric ideas about progress. These ideas became the foundation for the development episteme. The development episteme emerged out of both these scientific endeavors and the missionary-imperialist project to disseminate European Christianity, commerce, and “civilization” to Africans. Knowledge explorers, cartographers, medical doctors, biologists, economists, ethnologists, and other scientists produced about Africa facilitated colonization by claiming mastery over the continent’s environment and people. Europeans drew on this scientific information to assert their technological expertise and moral right to “civilize” Africans. European scholars suggested their expertise was needed because they knew Africans best. Yet the development episteme was formulated in dialogue with Africans whose own knowledge and interests often determined which development efforts would succeed and which would fail. Many Africans working for Europeans were educated in Western, most often missionary schools. As such, African assistants were adept at filtering information through a Western lens. This filter transformed African knowledge into European “facts.” More recently scholars of the global north have introduced forms of knowledge about Africa that do not perpetuate the notion of Western superiority, but that still rely on some of the assumptions built into nineteenth-century European epistemologies.

Chapter 4 shows that tensions about the applicability of knowledge were never more pronounced than when it came to geographical information. The Gazeta newspaper used its networks of knowledge to attempt to create a new ‘Description of Guatemala’ that would not just counter erroneous claims about the Americas peddled by some European philosophers, but also critically examined existing sources and formats of geographical knowledge. They rejected geography as a universal science that related places across the globe to each other, and instead prioritised information from current statistics as well as local historical archives. Individual reformers also contributed even more practical geographies that reported their own experience of travel. Geography and chorography was considered useful only in so far as it would help to increase trade and prosperity. It followed that securing transport connections through road and harbour works that would allow for an exploitation of natural wealth was the most important application of such knowledge. Reformers attempted to rewrite the geography of the Audiencia’s trade routes, and thought of their projects as integrating specific places more firmly into the geography of the region.

The introductory chapter sets the conceptual and theoretical scene for the book. It justifies why examining the formative role of self-determination and territoriality is important to understand why and by whom the map of Kurdistan is produced and used, and how it is perceived. It argues that, as a means of communicating Kurdish nationalist ideals to international society, the map of Kurdistan is generated and perceived through prevalent assumptions on the link between nation and territory. These assumptions derive from the principle of self-determination. Changes in the meaning and function of self-determination have also changed assumptions on the link between nation and territory. Therefore, self-determination and the way in which the nation-territory link was understood had a formative role in the use and perception of the map of Kurdistan.