1. Introduction
Justissima Tellus—the infinitely just earth—is a pithy aphorism that poets use to express the historical idea that law emerged from the earth, as a tellurian nomos (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt2006, p. 42). Land has been a predominant, if not the primordial, motif for the justification of legal authority and the entrenchment of sovereignty, and the imaginal representation and circumscription of land, whether through neolithic petroglyphs or a map of the British Isles on its Great Seal, afforded the possibility of a juris-diction.Footnote 1 In other words, the diverse methods of imaging land, from stick charts and pebble formations to pictorial maps and topographical sheets, have, in visible and visual ways, authorised the diction, which is to say the authoritative speech, of law (juris) (Goodrich, Reference Goodrich2008, p. 213).Footnote 2 Although with the advent of maritime explorations and thalassocracies, and the more contemporary phenomena of subterranean mining, underwater expeditions, and space explorations, law has long since moved on from its historically exclusive ties to land; genealogically, land-appropriation, in the form of demarcating tribal and communal property, was the “primeval act in founding law” (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt2006, p. 45). Law was invested in the measured correspondence with the earth and the equitable, or hostile, distribution emerging therefrom. Just as law emerged from its relations to the soil, so too legal institutions originated from a historically tellurian—whether mythic, sacred, or rational—and more specifically agrarian, tie.
The soil received its juridical authorisation through marks strewn across it that proclaimed proprietorship, and with time, it was the images and representations of these marks, which were progressively rendered in linear terms, that became constitutive of jurisdiction, gradually supplanting and even preceding the original edaphic referent.Footnote 3 Territory eventually succeeded, not preceded, the imaginal inscription of lines on maps.Footnote 4 The representation of lines drawn on the soil, of cartography as writing the earth, now occupies a ubiquitous place in our world. Maps not only inundate our reality, impel our direction, depict weather forecasts, provide demographic data, and distinguish electoral districts, but they also mark property boundaries, distinguish state lines, represent territorial limits, provoke geopolitical crises, and sustain sovereign claims. These are all more or less well-known cartographic functions and have merited scrutiny, in varying degrees, from various disciplines. Yet, the historically constituted intrinsic ties that bind maps and law, cartography and jurisdiction, the visual and the legal, are yet to receive sustained attention. In order “[t]o be effective, jurisdiction has to be inscribed, apparent, available to spatial dissemination and temporal transmission” (Goodrich, Reference Goodrich2008, p. 214). But the visual work that precedes jurisdictional ordering is often blackboxed and is either passed unnoticed or inherited as already complete and thereby not deserving further attention.Footnote 5 This article engages with two aspects of how cartography enabled law and jurisdictional ordering in a specific historical context. First, by interrogating the ways in which the great trigonometrical surveys of the British colonial enterprise and the Atlas of India entrenched “India” as a distinct, coherent, continuous, and contiguous geographical entity, this article will demonstrate how an epistemology rooted in scientific rigour and a civilising impulse produced the perception of India as a thoroughly refined British legal territory. Although there existed in British India, in the mid-nineteenth century, multiple forms of government, and various sites of authority, not least the numerous princely states which were, to varying degrees, in treaty relations with the British Government, the trigonometrical surveys and the resultant Atlas produced a sense of the Indian space as dominated by and thoroughly under the control, or influence, of the British Crown. Second, by engaging with the maps and records of colonial cadastral and revenue surveys, this article will show how maps played a critical role in the visualisation of British Indian territory in terms of police networks, and how such a visualisation paved the way for the rationalisation and systematisation of horizontal and vertical jurisdictions across the territory. Trigonometrical surveys and cadastral revenue surveys were, in the internal logic of the Survey of India, intricately linked together. As the surveyor Clements Markham notes in his Memoir, “[o]ne important object of the Revenue Survey is to fill up the outlines fixed by the Great Trigonometrical Survey, and, as the ‘Calcutta Review’ expresses it, ‘to put sinews and flesh on the colossal skeleton which that survey constructs’” (Markham, Reference Markham1878, p. 118). If the external outlines were to be fixed by the Great Trigonometrical Surveys and the Atlas of India that it produced, then the internal rationalisation was delegated to cadastral surveys. The Atlas and the revenue surveys worked in tandem to create a sense of a unified territory with uniform constituent parts. Taken together, this article engages with how British colonial cartography, with an apparent scientific force, produced Indian territory as an integrated geographical entity, constituted by juridical institutions with neatly organised jurisdictional rationalities, which were laid down based on an antecedent imagination of such a framework through cartographic picturing.
While there exists several works on the history of cartography, including the relatively recent turn to critical cartography, which show how maps visually produced territory, and while there are also several rigorous accounts of cartography in India, literature on the intersections of law and cartography, especially in an Indian context, is yet to sufficiently develop.Footnote 6 Scholarship on this remains disparate and fragmented, ranging from the works of Dorsett and Barr in the context of Australia and Ford’s work about the United States to Chalmer’s work apropos Hong Kong and Rajkovic’s work on cartography and international law (Dorsett, Reference Dorsett and McVeigh2006; Barr, Reference Barr2015; Ford, Reference Ford1999; Rajkovic, Reference Rajkovic2018). Legal geography as a field is yet to sufficiently investigate the role of cartography in the creation of sovereignty and territory. This article aims to contribute to the relevance of cartography in the history of law and jurisdiction from a particular historical context and cultural milieu. In doing so, it aims to provide a broad understanding of how a drive towards unification and uniform depiction of territory was first conceptualised through the use of maps and then implemented on the ground. It highlights the scientific and cultural bases that enabled the use of a map as a legal technology (Dorsett and McVeigh, Reference Dorsett and McVeigh2012, pp. 63–6). Trigonometry, as will be evinced in the section to follow, acted as a scientific tool that can measure land in order to subsequently render it as a known territory. As Kapil Raj has highlighted, while there existed sophisticated mechanisms of measuring land even within Mughal cartographic practices, the advent of survey routes and large-scale cartographic operations, followed by extensive triangulations and trigonometrical surveys, made possible new forms of cartographic representations with excessively populated geographical information, and even served “as a model for the future mapping of Britain itself” (Raj, Reference Raj2007, p. 77). In many ways, there existed similar ideological assumptions that propelled the conversion of land into legal territory in the metropole as well as the colonies, with varying effects. This article engages with that presupposition, the ideology that enabled these significant cartographic innovations, and how they were of use to law and jurisdictional control.
The potential to uniformly impose laws across a given territory depended on the imaginative potential to depict unified land. While the British in India constantly struggled to provide that sense of fixed boundaries of administrative territory, especially in the frontiers where sovereignty and authority were layered and blurry, characterised by what has been termed as a “fuzzy logic” (McKay, Reference McKay, Agha and Kolsky2009, p. 80), it was within the epistemology of the age, the intellectual horizon of the times, to believe, despite the realities of the land, that a fixed outline could be produced visually if not in reality.Footnote 7 A visual record of the extent of territory was needed to ascertain the limit point of what the common law perceived as the lex terrae. As Matthew Edney has demonstrated in his treatise, “…the rational, uniform space of the British maps of India was…a space imbued with power relations…they could impose India-wide legislation and reforms in a manner impossible for earlier rulers” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, p. 333). Effective control necessitated and determined the desire to produce imaginative representations, whereby territorial contours and limits could be inscribed and visualised in order to rationalise a coordinated and coherent rule within properly circumscribed limits. This desire to produce unified images, to have monocular representations of territory under a single coherent gaze, not only affected administrative inclinations in the Indian subcontinent, both on a pan-India level as well as much more intricately at provincial and district levels, but it also pervaded much of British cartographic interest on a global scale from the eighteenth century onwards. While the particularities of British colonialism varied in different geographical and political circumstances, such as in the American Mainland and the Indian Subcontinent, a common set of axioms, nevertheless, tied together the various possessions as part of the same imperial framework.Footnote 8 The source of imperial authority emerged ultimately from the same sovereign power, through charters, proclamations, and regulations. It behoved such an understanding to produce unified representations of the Empire (Figure 1).Footnote 9 Colonial unification of land—either by tedious route surveys and topographical sketches or through elaborate trigonometrical measurement and geometric representation—and a resultant uniform application of the rule of law, was, in the imperial logic, a hallmark that was representative of civilised rule of the modern liberal state. According to this line of reasoning, representing a worldwide view of the British imperial possessions was also reflective of the advanced civilisational rationality and skill of British science and administrative law that sustained such a vast empire. Jules Michelet has claimed that “l’histoire est d’abord toute géographie” (history is first of all complete geography) and the history of British colonialism, and its ideologies of law and rule, was intrinsically related to its gestures of geographic representations, and its putatively pure science of cartography (Osborne, Reference Osborne1995, p. 35). The science of such a representation, to reinvoke Latour, does more than just produce realist replicas, mimetic frames, or authentic copies; “[t]hrough successive stages they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world…I can never verify the resemblance between my mind and the world, but I can, if I pay the price, extend the chain of transformations wherever verified reference circulates through constant substitutions” (Latour, Reference Latour1999, p. 79).
British Empire throughout the World Exhibited in One View (compiled by John Bartholomew); Published by London and Edinburgh: A. Fullarton & Co (1872). Available in public domain. Retrieved from the Library of Congress
Figure 1. Long description
A historical map titled British Empire throughout the World Exhibited in One View, compiled by John Bartholomew and published in 1872. The map shows the extensive global territories of the British Empire, highlighting key regions under British control. The map includes detailed illustrations of various indigenous peoples and notable figures from different parts of the empire. The geographic region shown spans across the continents of North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Key labeled locations include major cities, colonies, and territories such as Canada, India, Australia, and various African colonies. The map uses color shading to differentiate between different territories and possessions of the British Empire. The top and bottom of the map feature illustrations of various indigenous peoples and notable figures from different parts of the empire, showcasing the diversity of the British colonial subjects. The map also includes tables listing British possessions and their respective areas and populations. The central focus of the map is on the global reach and extent of the British Empire, emphasizing its vast territorial holdings and influence around the world.
John Bartholomew’s “British Empire throughout the World Exhibited in One View” (Figure 1) is an exemplary instance of the desire to have, under a single gaze, all territorial possessions stretched across the earth. Reminiscent of Borges’ fictional Empire, the British Empire’s far-flung territorial possessions, albeit having significantly receded by this time, are brought to bear to the viewer under a single bidimensional image (Borges, Reference Borges and Borges1999, p. 325). The extent and force of imperial authority, in Bartholomew’s depiction, is represented in at least three distinct ways: tabular listing, pictorial representation of native subjects, and colour coding of the territory. The title of the cartograph itself is depicted on a globe which contains lines forming distinct geographical formations, indicating that the British Empire, engraved on the globe, is still the dominant force “throughout the World.” Under the globe lies a “Note,” which one could easily miss, explaining that: “The British Possessions are engraved in a bolder character and coloured Red.” And so, our eyes are immediately asked to look at the various spots of pinkish red strewn across the map in various sizes. Amidst uncoloured, and thereby undifferentiated, swathes of land, the coloured and boldly engraved portions of the earth are meant to jump out and stand apart as distinct geographical units. Some lands have colours sprayed throughout their territories, such as Australia or India, while some have colours underlining boldly engraved names, as those of Sierra Leone or Fernando Po in Western Africa. Whether unified and contiguous or discontinuous and intermittent, the combination of colour and bold text informs the viewer of the extensive spread of the British Empire across the globe. Tabulated lists on the upper right and left corners further enumerate “British Possessions in the different quarters of the world” and catalogue the areas under British control itemised by continent and further divided provincially. The area of each possession is rendered in square miles, beside an enumeration of the corresponding population in each continent and province that are subjects of the Empire. The table on the right also carries a “grand total” of the area and population that fall under British imperial authority, over 7 million square miles and nearly 165 million subjects: a massive, and still the predominant, Empire.
Pictorial depictions of “Australian Settlers and Natives,” “North Americans” both “White and Copper Coloured,” natives of “Cape Colony and Southern Africa,” “Natives of British Empire in Europe,” and “Natives of British Asia and East Indian Islands,” act as horizontal borders to the cartograph. The territories of the British Empire are not emptied of people, they are far from the terra nullius status of land with which Australia was characterised upon its “discovery,” but are instead filled with a range of people, all of whom constitute, in varying degrees, the subjects of the British Crown. Clothed gentry in Europe represent aristocratic and noble society, and bare-chested natives of Australia and Africa bring home the sense of primitive civilisation. While different shades of engraving are expressive of the tone of skin (some inscribed with lines, some with dots, some with a darker hue, and some lighter), accoutrements and regalia (such as horned and feathered headdresses or evening top hats) express civilisation and class. The differentiation in posture (sitting on the land, mounted on a horse, or standing upright), tones of skin (represented through the extent of shading), variety of dress (suits, sailor uniforms, royal outfits, dhotis, loincloths, gowns, scarves), and change of sceneries in the backgrounds (factories, docks, forests, woods, temples), as well as the varied weapons (ranging from spears to bayonets, clubs to rifles) all indicate the diversity of populations that comprise and agglomerate into the British Empire. In simple terms: The World in One View; all part of the Empire. It was a testament to British skill in folding the innumerable and the diverse under the same imperial banner, on a globe that bears the name of Britain. It is not merely symbolic that such a vivid and expansive representation is given such an importance on a cartograph, for maps functioned as centripetal tools in assembling imperial structures, flattening diversity, abstracting and commodifying land, and acting as technologies of jurisdiction in the transposition of sovereignty and legal authority. What Bartholomew’s map signifies is a drive that pervaded much of imperial thought in the nineteenth century.
It was a drive towards unified renditions and assemblages of imperial enterprises that also fuelled the desire for a Great Trigonometrical Survey in India: to grasp a single authoritative image of British India. As with Bartholomew’s depiction, Indian representations too engaged in the appropriation, however successful or unsuccessful, of diversity under the unifying gaze of imperial authority. India, albeit the theatre of historical diversity, was produced as a unified geographic entity. As Edney argues, “the British constructed India as the stage upon which historians have placed past events and phenomena in strict chronological sequence” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, pp. 333, 236). Cartography and triangulation played a crucial role in the setting up of this stage, in the production of “a single space structured by a common geometric framework.” Unified common law was preceded by the unification and rationalisation of common land.
2. The grand unified image
In the early nineteenth century, owing to the persistent efforts of Bridge Major William Lambton, scientific measurement and geometric representations increasingly, although not entirely, supplanted the hitherto dominant methods of route surveys and topographical sketches as preferred means to represent British territory in India.Footnote 10 As Valentine Blacker, who succeeded William Hodgson as the Surveyor General of India in 1823, argued, not only were trigonometrical surveys part of those cartographic operations that were ratified and approved by science, but all of Europe had recognised the indispensable role of triangulatary frameworks for accurate geographic, if not geodetic, knowledge. Trigonometry, unlike and in opposition to the earlier route surveys and astronomical observations of Major James Rennell, exemplified “the character, power, interests, and opportunities enjoyed by the Honourable Company” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, p. 239). To adopt the scientifically accurate basis of triangulations would signify that the colonial enterprise had entered a new stage of enlightenment-based administration in the Indian terrain. In this epistemological framework, not only was the complexity of the world to be reduced, “in a rational manner,” to an “ordered mathematical abstraction,” which impelled the creation of a single cartographic archive, what Matthew Edney has termed as “a geographic panopticon,” in the Indian subcontinent, but a systematic transposition of science was to “obviate the effects of traditional Indian habits such as fraud, dishonesty, collusion, and laziness” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, pp. 311, 293, 24, 277). Representing the Indian terrain through established scientific principles, which were valorised in Europe, by surveyors trained in the appropriate geometric techniques and who epitomised the highest ideals of Baconian science, it was urged, would inevitably lead to the refurbishing of India into a civilised nation. No leap of interpretation is necessary to infer this judgement, for it was an explicitly and avowedly proclaimed goal, as exemplified in the letter that Thomas Best Jervis, provisional surveyor general of India, wrote in 1837 to the Court of Directors of the East India Company: “Such a body [of trained surveyors] would in a singular manner conduce to the easy and unexceptionable introduction of useful science, and industrious habits where they are most wanted: amongst the Natives of India.”Footnote 11
But the great trigonometrical project promised more than just the induction of Indian natives into civilised life characterised by industrious habits. It further ensured not only a single geographic archive for the entire Indian territory but also a unified image to be the authoritative representation.
All the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in cartographic representations that prevailed hitherto, it was argued, would be obviated in favour of a complete, uniform, and systematic knowledge of India. The Atlas of India, resulting from elaborate trigonometrical baselines and chains of triangles (Figure 2), connecting the farthest points of Indian territory from the south to the north, and the east to the west, appearing to run uninhibited across the terrain, was to be the map of India.Footnote 12 The introduction of this new framework for apprehending Indian territory also ushered in, as Nilanjana Mukherjee has argued, a new relationship “between soil and subject, between land and owner” (Mukherjee, Reference Mukherjee2020, p. 38). The Atlas, the product of the extensive triangulations, provided the perception of an omniscient and omnipotent view, which was invariably instrumental in not only firmly and surely entrenching the geobody of India for posterity, for it continues to remain a model of contemporary trigonometrical surveys, but having once established the contours of the territory and its limits, it permitted the colonial government to envisage India-wide application of the laws. If the Charter of 1813 rested, for the first time, the sovereignty of the territorial possessions in India with the British Crown, the coherent imagination of the territories, unified through the triangles, appeared to provide a scientifically accurate basis to impose colonial laws on the land on a uniform and coordinated basis. Hitherto recalcitrant parcels of land, especially at the northwestern frontier provinces and the north eastern hills, were brought, through the Atlas, into a single and amalgamated colonial gaze, akin to Bartholomew’s unified depiction, amenable and subject to colonial laws.Footnote 13 The effect of the triangulation was a “British view of India in the 1820s: fixed, eternal, imperial, and known (or knowable) to the British through scientific observation” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, p. 235). In depicting India as fixed, eternal, and known, it was increasingly made possible to represent to the world that the territory is now fully and completely under the control of the British, which becomes especially relevant given that the Atlas was published just after the Charter Act of 1813, and emanated from the Crown’s authority to render for itself a singular image of its crowned possession.
Index Chart to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (Survey of India, 1870; available in public domain)
The Great meridional arc, the only white line of triangles in the centre of Figure 2, the longest measurement of the earth to ever be attempted, ran from Dehradun in the foothills of the Himalayas all the way to Cape Comorin in the far south, and acted as the central nervous system for the British cartographic clasp of India. A uniform and detailed map of India, as it was reckoned in the parliamentary hearings when the Charter Act was renewed in 1833, made possible “the establishment of a single, India-wide administration of the revenue and civil justice systems.”Footnote 14 Any pan-India system of governance necessitated, for coordination and jurisdictional rationality, a systematic and intrinsically unified representation. Legislators in the metropole understood well that “[t]hey could thus legislate for all of India without thought for particular circumstances” once “they could look at the maps of India…and could conceive of India as a political entity” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, p. 325). Insofar as the detached and abstracted perception of space provided a geographic epistemology and a monoscopic image divested of the concrete circumstances and diverse political realities, however successful or unsuccessful such an epistemology and resultant image was on the ground, it provided a rational justification to conceptualise India as a unified entity for British laws. “The British suborned the geographical character of those territories to a mathematical space even as they reduced the political structures to the ‘rule of law’” (Edney, Reference Edney1997, p. 333). A scopic regime, enabled by scientific abstraction and trigonometrical potential, prevailed over and pervaded the colonial power of the British Crown in India. In that, the rule of law was preceded by, and constantly accompanied, a rule by vision.
In a crucial sense, the displacement of indigenous laws in India by the modern legal system through codification, as Galanter has posited, and the resultant unification of a pan-wide, territorial Indian law, was based on the preceding cartographic unification of the territory as a knowable, communicable, unified, and traversable entity (Galanter, Reference Galanter1968). The laws applicable in India before the onset of the Crown’s jurisdiction were plural, disparate, and overlapping. “Parliamentary charters and acts, Indian legislation (after 1833), Company Regulations, English common law and ecclesiastical and admiralty law, Hindu law, Muslim law, and many bodies of customary law were combined in a bewildering array” (Galanter, Reference Galanter1968, p. 68). The modern legal system, which was achieved through an idiosyncratic combination of rationalisation of indigenous laws and codification, predominantly displaced the authority of the plural indigenous tribunals and “expropriated” parts of it within the emergent common law in India. Such an expropriation, where feasible, was made possible by claiming territory through the visuality of the map, for it was the map which indicated which part of the land was to be allowed its autonomy of law and which was to be governed by the emerging new legal regime. Even the border zones lying adjacent to princely states, after the advent of imperial mapping practices, were refurbished as within British Indian territory (Suresh, Reference Suresh2024). Such an intellectual linkage between cartography and jurisdictional rationality, between unified image and unification of territory, a fixed view and a coherently coordinated rule, however, had imperial antecedents back in the metropole, given that it had already proven to be successful in England.
The need for trigonometrical surveys was seriously taken up in England as a cause of utmost national importance in response to Cassini de Thury’s map of France commissioned by Louis XV in the mid-eighteenth century. It was urged, especially by William Borlase and Henry Baker, that the nature and status of English cartography was yet to catch up with the advanced cartographic practices of France. In 1759, the recently established Royal Society of Arts, after much deliberation and debate, awarded a sum of £100 and an additional gratuity specifically for a trigonometrical survey in the British Isles (Edney, Reference Edney1997, pp. 43–4). So began, in England, a long history of trigonometry as the exemplary science of measuring the land with an accuracy and convenience that surpassed the tedious nature of field surveys and route journeys.Footnote 15 In competing with France, England accelerated its own cartographic methods according to de l’esprit géométrique (the geometric spirit) of the Enlightenment. As Michael has argued, competitively fuelled by the need to have firm, if not fixed, geo-bodies, “France and England began to represent their territories as bounded entities, even if that was not the reality on the ground” (Michael, Reference Michael2012, p. 98). If from the sixteenth century onwards, maps had already began to play a decisive role as key tools of administrative regulation, not least through the increasing representation of British territory (including Scotland, Wales, and Ireland) as inviolable sovereign possession, the advent and widespread employment of trigonometrical surveys produced a closer correspondence between man and earth, albeit through an increased distance, so much so that it was now perceived that territories, in its entirety, can be reduced to a single archive and an authoritative image. Not only were the Royal Proclamations that granted the “discovered” territories in the American Mainland to trading companies—such as the Virginia Charter (James I Proclamation, 1606) or the Pennsylvania Charter (Charles II Proclamation, 1681)—based on an idiosyncratic justification that combined Ptolemaic and graticulated cartography, physical landmarks, and a sacred sovereign authority of the Crown, but the agglomeration of the Common Law in the British Isles itself was made possible through crucial territorial unification projects of the seventeenth century.Footnote 16
As Ford has detailed, although the English Common Law was meant to “unify and define” England, it was hardly able to do either until the seventeenth century (Ford, Reference Ford1999, p. 880). It was “fractured and inconsistent,” and competed with a cornucopia of other legal practices (“Roman civil law, canon law and a bewildering variety of local customary law”), and a plethora of medieval courts with diverse jurisdictions (“national, regional and local courts, ecclesiastical and secular courts, courts occasional and permanent … courts of considerable antiquity and courts newly erected or asserted, courts swamped with business and courts moribund for lack of suitors”) (Ford, Reference Ford1999, p. 881). The ascendancy of common law was based on “a war of jurisdictions in which the ecclesiastical courts and civilian law were eventually subjugated to the prerogative and will of the king’s courts” (Goodrich, Reference Goodrich1995, p. 78).Footnote 17 The centralisation of common law depended on twin factors: a single legal system that can collapse the multiplicity of the diverse into a flat uniformity, and a uniform territorial structure to coordinate the unified legal system. If the doctrines of common law furnished the former, especially through the ingenious efforts of Lord Edward Coke and his contemporaries in obviating the distinctness of local customary practices, then the cartographic impulse of territorial unification enabled the latter. Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England as Wales enabled the unification of all English and Welsh counties under a single sovereign image, all ruled under an Elizabethan gaze (Blomley, Reference Blomley1994, pp. 83–4). Unification of common law, which Goodrich and Hachamovitch stress as having not only its own history, but also its own territory, was accompanied by, contemporaneously, the visual unification of England into a compact territory (Goodrich and Hachamovitch, Reference Goodrich1991). Pre-Norman territorial divisions, such as the “shire” and the “hundred,” which wielded their own jurisdictions, were recast and redrawn, and suitably adjusted and modified where relevant, as towns and cities, rendered as corporations that were part of, and subjugated under, governmental subdivisions (Ford, Reference Ford1999, p. 885). A uniformly coordinated Common Law, as aforementioned, was based on the unification and rationalisation of land. Insofar as the “birth of English jurisdiction went hand in glove with the consolidation of the English Common Law… the history of English jurisdiction illuminates the critical link between territory and legal practice” which went on to become “a defining characteristic of the modern jurisdiction” (Ford, Reference Ford1999, p. 880). Common law, in other words, based itself not just upon a historically produced sense of “artificial reason” (Dorsett, Reference Dorsett2002; Goodrich and Hachamovitch, Reference Goodrich, Hachamovitch and Fitzpatrick1991), but also on a unified territory that enabled a centralised application of law. It was the model of such a cartography, that was suffused with the contentious history and impulsive politics of legal uniformity and jurisdictional rationality, that impelled the colonial Survey of India to create, through the trigonometrical surveys, the first exhaustive unified image of India, materialised in the Atlas that it produced.
As the index chart to the Great Trigonometrical Survey (Figure 2) indicates, what was desired was a chain of triangles to be laid throughout the territory to decipher and represent the land accurately and authoritatively. Triangulation encompassed a complex process of measuring land. Surveyors first select a series of hills or tall buildings to lay down a chain of triangles. They then measure the interior angles of the triangles to get an accurate measurement of the surrounding landscape. The triangles that ran across the Indian territory, as shown in the index chart, were also signs of visual control and tellurian appropriation insofar as it provided a perception that the land, through measurements of baselines and corresponding angles, has been completely grasped, recorded, pacified, and subdued for the colonial regime and appropriated as part of its rule, especially given that a number of trees had to be felled to enable the surveyor’s gaze, and a number of peaks and pagodas had be surmounted to allow a clear view. More crucially, at many locations, the surveyors were met with resistance from natives who were under the impression that the 30-foot marks used for theodolite sightings were effigies of Queen Victoria and that it enabled the Crown’s gaze on their land (Simpson, Reference Simpson2021, p. 99). It was felt, in the native understanding, that the elaborate instruments and massive retinue that accompanied the surveys were parts of a sovereign ritual undertaken to establish authority.
For the British survey officers, distance and abstraction combined to provide a measurement that was useful to objectify and commodify land, which could then be made malleable and pliable for the inscription of authority as triangles were extended. As Barr has evocatively argued:
notice the process of abstraction that occurs. With triangulation, it is no longer necessary physically to walk the land in order to survey and map the details, as that can come later. Rather, through a process of knowing some information (i.e. a few points, a couple of angles) a triangle can be formed that has no attachment to the texture of the land. In many ways an exemplar of Euclidean space, where the triangle becomes reproduced as rational order, this particular triangle hosts a double reduction in Lefebvrian terms from social to abstract space then to a representation of space (Barr, Reference Barr2015, p. 211).
But the map no longer occupies just a medium of representing space, a “representation of space,” but it becomes an autonomous “space of representation,” characterised by an appropriative impulse and a productive visual substitution for the realities of the land (Siegert, Reference Siegert2011, p. 13). Through the laying down of the continuous series of triangles—made possible through a British constructed theodolite, 30 foot markers, perambulators and a host of other instruments, and a massive retinue of surveyors and assistants passing through the territory in order to create a single geographic archive of the country for the coloniser’s knowledge—what emerged, it was felt, was an authoritative image, representative of the country in a unified way that was never understood before. “As geo-spaces got chequered by the ever-continuing triangles,” creeping across the land in a serpentine fashion, “they invariably got inscribed as imperial space, shaping new geo-political realities such as the nation or the empire” (Mukherjee, Reference Mukherjee2020, p. 48). India could be redefined and recast as the scientifically abstracted terrain of, for, and by the British Empire. In the measurement of the land lay the seeds for the entrenchment of an all-India-wide imperial presence. All existing maps had to be fit into the framework of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, or cast aside if conflicting, and all future maps had to be agglomerated into the ever-increasing geographic archive made possible through the survey (Edney, Reference Edney1997, p. 234).
Most notably, if the earlier methods of cartographic practices still necessitated cooperation from the natives, for local knowledge of territory, the advancements of the trigonometrical survey methods dispensed with any such need. British surveyors and Eurasian assistants completed the necessary surveying tasks and mathematical computations, and if at all the native Indian was relevant, it was either for the assistance in computations, as needed, or a requirement for menial labour in the carrying of instruments, transporting the theodolite, and the construction of towers. The Great Trigonometrical Survey, in other words, made possible a knowledge from above—insofar as measurements were based on high altitude; a control from afar—insofar as the actual traversing of all of points in the field was unnecessary; and an intrusion from outside—insofar as native collaboration and intricate knowledge were no longer indispensable. In many ways, the view from above furnishes the surveyor with a symbolic as well as a material power to transform what lay below. Triangulation, and the ambitious machinations of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, is an exemplary instance of the idiosyncratic power of elevated vision. Elevation is key to ideological superiority. For, as de Certeau has argued,
elevation transforms him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be Solar Eye, looking down like a God. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive; the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more… (de Certeau, Reference de Certeau1984, p. 36).
Triangulation also paved the way for a new form of extending the jurisdiction of common law. The triangles were modes of jutting further the reach of the law, and transmogrifying space as pacified venues for the imposition of common law, supplanting and disavowing alternative customary practices and normative modes of living. As Barr notes, although in the context of colonial trigonometrical surveys in Australia, but which is equally applicable in the Indian context insofar as the methodology used was the same, “the practice of trigonometrical surveying offered a certain form of common law control over the land of others” (Barr, Reference Barr2015, p. 211). Disrupting extant relations between people, place, and custom, “the power of the triangle is the abstract manner through which common law encounters and displaces indigenous forms of law; ground-clearing and place-making its way into new spaces.”
As more territories were folded within the imperial gaze, the more it was made possible to coordinate the legal system. If trigonometrical surveying provided the means to externally unify land, represent an authoritative image, appropriate indigenous terrain, and assert a totalising knowledge based on a single cartographic archive, cadastral surveys provided the means to offer internal jurisdictional rationality both horizontally and vertically. Even within the internal logic of the Survey of India, trigonometry and cadastral revenue surveys went hand in hand as twin facets of an appropriative process. Whereas trigonometry attempted to entrench and fix the external outlines of the administrative territory, providing a bird’s eye, pan-India view, enabling a scopic vision of the entire territory under one gaze, cadastral survey provided closer details of juridical realities on the ground on a large-scale, district-by-district, basis. If the former entrenched the geobody as legal territory, the latter provided a means of internally adjusting and rationalising the system so as to afford a total coordination of units within the larger framework. As will become evident, the unification and authoritative rendition of India as a singular geographical entity was further bolstered by the jurisdictional systematisation and juridical rationalisation that was simultaneously being operationalised through provincial cadastral surveys. In that context, unification of land and rationalisation of law were cartographically Janus faced, each supplementing and sustaining the other.
3. Systematising and rationalising jurisdiction
Valverde has argued that “[l]egal governance…is always already itself governed: and the governance of legal governance is the work of jurisdiction” (Valverde, Reference Valverde2009, p. 18). In Valverde’s account, it is a prior determination of the appropriate scale to be used that determines the structure and operation of legal governance. Scalar theory, for Valverde, helps to underscore the epistemological selections of governance structures in arriving at methodologies of governance. Despite Valverde’s overt reluctance to engage more intricately with cartography, it is the British cartographic practices in India that most directly make her case. For it was based on a systematic use of cadastral and revenue surveys, and a redrawing of boundaries on the map, that the colonial enterprise was able to rationalise its jurisdictional functions and juridical institutions in the subcontinent both horizontally as well as vertically. It was cartography that embodied the practice of jurisdiction as the governing of legal governance. Maps, in other words, were tools used for jurisdictional techniques that enabled the rearrangement and redistribution of powers and authorities. The scale of the law was already configured and oriented to a particular scale as visualised in the cartograph.
Administrative districts in India, as the East India Company realised soon after it procured the diwani rights to collect revenue through the Allahabad Treaty after the Battle of Buxar, were discontinuous, non-contiguous, and haphazardly organised, whereby parts of many districts were detached and found as enclaves in other districts, parts of districts were intricately combined and intermeshed with parts of other districts, and a plethora of institutions wielded overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions over the same administrative territory. As Bernardo Michael’s rendition of the 1846 map of the district of Jaunpur demonstrates (Figure 3), parts of the administrative division of Raree were detached and present as an isolated enclave to its north, parts of Awadh were ensconced as an enclave within Ghiswa, and parts of Mureaaho were wedged between Ghiswa, Raree, and Kureatmendah. The territorial divisions across India remained, in such a way, non-contiguous, discontinuous, and without the uniformity that was desired by the British administration so as to enable a systematic jurisdictional practice. Indigenous topographical maps of existing administrative divisions represented the political realities of medieval India, where administration was based on a range of separate, but overlapping, jurisdictions, as opposed to consistent jurisdictions based on linear boundaries (Michael, Reference Michael2012, p. 92). In Goettlich’s study of the history of linearisation, the “British administrators…found it difficult to understand the existing divisions as they found them constantly shifting and filled with enclaves” (Goettlich, Reference Goettlich2019, p. 219). Such a haphazard state of administrative reality, unsuitable to standard British practices, provoked a radical readjustment of territory, whereby a police-based network was visualised on the map and then subsequently operationalised in praxis for administrative uniformity and jurisdictional clarity. It was the gaze of the police that enabled and structured the basic readjustment of many provincial districts that were under British control. The overarching unit of division in this readjustment was the thana, the Hindi word for “police station,” which was used as the organising principle to rationalise jurisdictional practices.
Mapwork by Bernardo A. Michael and Natalie Burack
Administrative officials resolved to recreate the territorial divisions based on “a naturalized vision of territory where it remained continuous and without overlaps in its layout, while being enclosed by linear boundaries” (Michael, Reference Michael2012, p. 100). Not only were administrative divisions recast in such a way that each division was bounded and did not overlap with another division, obviating the presence of enclaves, but also each division was to be circumscribed according to the jurisdictional limits of its own thana. The recasting of the subdivisions according to the limits of the thana jurisdictions, as evinced in the 1903 Report on Administration of Bengal, was explicitly adopted not only for “more compact arrangements” but also keeping in mind the “purposes of Police” (Michael, Reference Michael2012, p. 122). What the colonial administration, in effect, achieved was not just the calcification of linear and continuous administrative divisions, with an enclosed and compact territorial structure, but a systematisation whereby a policing gaze on the map allowed not only a horizontal jurisdictional rationalisation on the ground but also the policing of the territory based on an antecedent imagination. In a crucial sense, this process preceded the cartographic grid frameworks that organised the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police, outside “Greater London,” into the extensive and neatly organised beat divisions and subdivisions (Collins, Reference Collins2018; Moran and McGhee, Reference Moran and McGhee1998). Each thana was a juridical institution with its own powers and responsibilities, and in adjusting the boundaries in such a way that the thana became the organising principle, the colonial readjustment processes anticipated much earlier what Michel Foucault later identified as “new mapping and [its function in] surveillance of the urban space” (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Kritzman1988, p. 142). Furthermore, the cartograph also provided a basis whereby the readjusted thana division would be suitably circumscribed so that it corresponded to its own revenue (tehsil) and judicial (munisfi) divisions. As opposed to earlier administrative divisions—where the thana divisions, pargana divisions (a Mughal subdivision encompassing a group of villages, and tentative limits of revenue and judicial jurisdictions), and the district boundaries themselves were often laid out haphazardly, and where parts of a pargana’s jurisdiction was part of the thana jurisdiction of another pargana, and where parts of a thana’s jurisdiction was part of the territory of another district—colonial cartography rearranged the territorial divisions in such a way that each thana jurisdiction corresponded and remained within its own exclusive munsifi (judicial) and tehsil (revenue) jurisdictions, thereby rendering the administrative divisions with a vertically rationalised hierarchy. The erstwhile divisions of parganas were gradually superseded and were eventually completely supplanted by the new overarching principle of the thana jurisdiction.Footnote 18 The administrative divisions that one sees in the contemporary maps of India were a result of this colonial cartographic readjustment. The thana remained the fundamental organising principle for the colonial redrawing and rationalisation of jurisdictions and juridical institutions, betraying the primary role of the policing gaze in the reproduction of territory. The cartographic impulse derived its legitimation from legal regulations, such as Regulation 11 of 1833, which directed that the revenue divisions must coincide and be coextensive with thana jurisdictions. In effect, by redrawing land in such a way that the territory was neatly carved up into uniform parcels with its own units of authority, and each with its own vertical hierarchy of institutions, the cadastral inscriptions provided the imperial regime with a way to horizontally rationalise the territory with neatly systematised hierarchical juridical institutions.
Insofar as law and cartography worked together to proliferate a horizontally and vertically systematised jurisdictional rationality of juridical institutions, what we are witness to in exemplary fashion is a forgotten legal potentiality of the map, where maps combined with the visual gaze of policing power to render and recast administrative subdivisions in compact, contiguous, continuous, and territorially enclosed forms. In so cartographically rearranging the districts and ensuring uniformity in administrative practice, what was intended, and effected, was a rational reordering of jurisdictional systematicity and juridical hierarchies. In other words, the visual methodology of drawing and re-drawing administrative units on a map preceded and played an important, if undermined, role in the legal process of clarifying and arranging the jurisdictional limits of various juridical authorities. Power was imagined and drawn on the map, before it could be rearranged, redistributed, and deployed on the ground. The idea was not just horizontal uniformity of power, but also a neatly established chain of vertical authority with independent, albeit related, institutions having their separate functional zones. The governance of the law, in this fashion, was based on the governance practices carried out on the map. Just as the civil (barring family and personal laws) and criminal jurisdictions were made to perfectly align in territory, juridical institutions were made independently hierarchical in their respective subdivisions, and revenue wings of the state were made to be coextensive with the judicial, civil, and criminal divisions of the districts. In, and through, all these practices, cartography was, and continues to be, a legal practice of jurisdictional rationalisation that remains blackboxed in contemporary legal studies.
4. Conclusion
The British maps of India, as Barrow has stressed, “are about control—control over land, over access to locations, over names, over people, over representation, over the past” (Barrow, Reference Barrow2003, p. 183). Cartography played a crucial role in the Indian subcontinent not only in the entrenchment of a unified geographical image of India accompanied by an archival panopticon with a supposedly totalising knowledge, but it also radically readjusted internal territorial subdivisions and recast the terrain under the coercive power of the police state. Not unlike the unification of territory and evolution of common law in England, where alternative legal systems were gradually either extirpated and killed off or appropriated and reconfigured (akin to the displacement of indigenous laws in India with the ascendancy of the modern legal system), the unification of land and fixed entrenchment of territorial limits went hand in glove with the rationalisation of jurisdiction and reformulation of juridical institutions in India. The two processes worked side by side and mutually implicated each other in a synchronous territorial and legal drive. While the maps of the colonial regime have received considerable attention from a variety of disciplines, especially from critical cartography and imperial history, they are yet to be sufficiently engaged with from a legal perspective. What this article has attempted to demonstrate is not only that cartography played an exalted role, through the laying down of a country-wide series of triangles, in the creation of a fixed legal territory, as recognised in parliamentary debates on the renewal of Crown Charters, or that cartography made use of cadastral maps in refining jurisdictional rationality horizontally, which were made to align with a vertically structured hierarchy of juridical institutions, but also the more obvious, and therefore blackboxed, point that maps are relevant to legal history. Carto-graphy, as writing the earth, is also a primordial way of imagining the law. If John Bartholomew’s British Empire Throughout the World Exhibited in One View provided a unified image of the territories under the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth century, and Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales coalesced all the constituent counties under a centralised authority of Elizabethan rule, the Index Chart to the Great Trigonometrical Surveys furnished the barebone mechanisms through which the unification of legal territory were projected, imagined, and sought to be implemented in India. If cadastral maps depicted discontinuous administrative territory, lines and legends were recast and redrawn to usher in jurisdictional rationality. This pre-governance of legal governance, what is often undermined or ignored in legal thought, is achieved by cartography. A process by which cartography structures, regulates, and orders not only a panoptic, pan-Indian image of a unified and geographically continuous, contiguous, and coherent entity known as “India” on which a unified legal system, the rule of law, can be imposed, but also how maps rationalised the operation and scope of the police and judicial jurisdictions into separate, but consistent and uniform, horizontal units with clear and vertically aligned hierarchies. Jurisdiction is not invisible nor is it obscure and tenebrous, for it is visible, and leaves traces of its visuality across cartographic archives, and as is much needed to understand the work of law and scale. A close scrutiny of the performance and traces will orient us to the ways in which maps and cartographic practices orchestrate, organise and order juridical unifications and jurisdictional rationalities.
Acknowledgements
Peter Goodrich, Shaunnagh Dorsett, Lynette Chua, Adeel Hussain, Piyel Haldar, Jibraan Mansoor, Benjamin Goh, Ivan Lee, Matilde Cazzola, and Michael Dowdle offered constructive criticism, valuable feedback, and helpful suggestions on different versions of this article. This work was sharpened thanks to incisive comments received at a “Faculty Research Workshop” of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, the “Law and Geography in Urban Asia Workshop” at the Asia Research Centre of NUS, and the Companies in Asia Workshop at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. Dhiraj Nainani provided tremendous editorial advice at multiple stages of the work.
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