European maps at the end of the Early Modern Period. Techniques of construction.

• Applicant: Dr. Muriel González Athenas
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Early Modern History ; History of Science
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402754614

“European Geographies at the end of the Early Modern Period. Techniques of Construction”In current debates on Europe, which among others, are related to the financial and political crisis, the European Union oftentimes is characterized as a community of shared values and a homogenous legal and economic space. This characterization is based on a geographical conception of Europe as a spatial unity, which is rarely questioned. The current project is concerned with this assumed geographical unity or the cartographic production of this entity. Already in ancient times, there existed practices of graphical production of the world in the form of maps and atlases. Until today they undoubtedly represent powerful tools for the construction of ideas of order and visual appropriations. Political and exemplary pictorial orders always have been opposing each other. The project deals with these ideas and the construction of spatial notions of Europe. It will focus on the physical and intellectual genesis of Europe during the eighteenth century in its geographical and pictorial dimension as well as on the mediality of maps in general. The key assumption of the project is that between 1790 and 1860 in Western Europe, a geographically based spatialization of thinking and perception became prevalent, that came to be expressed in maps. Furthermore, I claim that these new graphic objects or media powerfully engaged in the reception and production of Eurocentric ideas of space. The analysis is based on an investigation of historical discourses on the production of maps, e.g. of instructions for the production of maps (cultural techniques). Cartography will be analyzed as a cultural technique that functions as a recursive network, in which processes and actors of map production are part of a permanent process of its constitution.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants