Steven Seegel. Map Men

During the second half of the nineteenth century, geography emerged as an academic discipline, especially in Prussia and the German Empire. Its early practitioners, led by the Saxonian Albrecht Penck, proposed that geography is an exact science. By and large, this view was readily accepted in Europe and North America because it merged with the epoch’s colonial prejudices, racism, antisemitism, and patriarchalism. What’s more, geography’s presumed “scientific” character allowed for “justifying” and furthering a variety of colonial and imperial projects. It was of import, especially to Germany, a latecomer to colonial empire building. Geographers’ “objective” descriptions and analyses of the earth’s surface were conveyed to the public at large and colleagues abroad through the malleable medium of maps. As Steven Seegel explores in Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe, inventing cartographic methodologies and techniques, producing and discussing maps, deploying them for political ends, and criticizing their colleagues’ maps constituted this age’s transnational “language of map,” which geographers-cum–map men spoke so well.

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