Blueprinting modernity: Nation -state cartography and intellectual ordering in Russia's European Empire, Ukraine, and former Poland-Lithuania, 1795--1917

As men serving nations and states, nineteenth-century military, historical, ethnographic cartographers codified the trends of imperialism, colonialism, and racism that were becoming normative among the "modernizing" European Great Powers from the Enlightenment until World War I and beyond. From 1795 to 9171, map production and dissemination was dominated by centralizing aims in Russia's European Empire, Ukraine, and former Poland-Lithuania. Nation-state cartography and the obsession with ordering combined to generate what Benedict Anderson has called a "totalizing classificatory grid" of modernity. Nineteenth-century cartographers enshrined their fantasies of order, progress, control, exploration, objectivity, and history itself. The dissertation treats texts rather than sources, and largely from the radical view that there is little distinction between the projection of power and production of knowledge.;After 1795, the Russian their mapped borderland subjects. Maps were deemed vital to the operative modes of history, geography, demography, ethnography, rationalism, romanticism, and positivism. Imperatives of ordering accompanied empire-building and empire-saving efforts, and territorially-based state security issues. From the 1840s to 1860s, the categories of race, ethnicity, language, and confession were increasingly fixed in maps as "natural" and "scientific" foundations. In 1914 and 1917, the borderlands peoples of former Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine aligned themselves geopolitically on this new modern scene of measurable and "mappable" designations.;The work is divided into four parts, with an introduction and conclusion: (I) Early Modern Politics and the Coming of Cartographic Modernity in East-Central Europe; (II) Imperial Territorialization and State Preservation in National Maps, 1795--1845; (III) Scientific Cartography and Political Categorization, 1845-1863; and (IV) Rationalization and the State-to-National Triumph of Cartographic Science, 1863-1917. The nine chapters refer to mapping practices: (1) Centering; (2) Founding; (3) Totalizing; (4) Memorializing; (5) Categorizing (6) Controlling; (7) Determining; (8) Carving; and (9) Battling Maps.;This dissertation is the first systematic investigation of nineteenth-century Russian cartography, and the first large-scale comparative and regional investigation of Central and Eastern European cartography. Research was conducted in libraries, archives, and museums in Krakow, Kyiv, L'viv, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Vilnius, Warsaw, and Wroclaw.