In The New Map of Empire, S. Max Edelson highlights a powerful “geographic dimension” of colonial unrest in the decades before the American Revolution (p. 301). Edelson takes an innovative approach both in his extensive use of maps as a primary source base and in his use of technology to make this research possible.

Victory in the Seven Years’ War against France (in 1763) won the British Empire territorial concessions from northern Canada to the Lesser Antilles. However, with these valuable acquisitions came the monumental tasks of surveying, mapping, and settling millions of acres of uncharted territory. The Board of Trade, newly empowered to manage all of Britain's colonial dominions, used this opportunity not only to map, but to reimagine the process of colonial settlement based on a new idea of imperial political economy emanating from Whitehall (p. 2). It is this motivating ideology that lies at the heart of Edelson's book.

For decades prior to 1763, American colonists had—without sanction from the Crown—been expanding into the western frontier, embodying the idea of “landed liberty” that over time became central to the colonial identity (p. 7). From the British perspective, however, this form of uncontrolled settler colonialism had come to threaten the territorial integrity of the British Empire in North America. Not only had the colonists dragged the empire into a costly war with France, but large tracts of land held by speculators went uncultivated, and further westward expansion threatened to put colonists beyond the purview of Britain's imperial network of production and consumption. As a result, the Board of Trade sought to reaffirm the idea of “an interdependent commercial system” by instituting a regulated system of settlement directed from London in the years after 1763 (p. 5). The most famous historical example of this is the Proclamation Line, drawn down the Appalachian Mountains to mark a boundary with Native American territory. Yet as Edelson demonstrates through an extensive cartographic survey, this new administrative agenda had enduring consequences across British North America.

As the title of the book suggests, maps were essential to this process of post-1763 colonial reform. Through an examination of five distinct imperial outposts, Edelson describes in detail the process through which imperial surveyors mapped such far-flung places as Canso Bay in Nova Scotia and the remote islands of Grenada and Tobago. Not only did these maps help British officials visualize vast spaces, but they could illustrate and advertise individual tracts of land to prospective settlers—showing everything from the location of preexisting settlements to the condition of the soil. Such maps sought to match climate with the best forms of colonial extraction, thereby enhancing the overall productivity of the empire. Yet for all the book's attention to the detail and nuance of individual maps, the strength of Edelson's narrative lies in his holistic analysis of the Board of Trade's cartographic corpus.

Edelson's primary source base is the collection of hundreds of maps commissioned by the Board of Trade between 1763 and 1775, which he has compiled into an impressive, freely accessible online database (http://mapscholar.org/empire). All cited maps appear here, rather than in the book itself (with sources for chapters 6 and 7 forthcoming). This tool allows readers to interact with the maps described in the book, while simultaneously encouraging readers to think about the collection as a whole and what it reveals about early modern understandings of space. The digital nature of Edelson's source base makes it possible for him to highlight the sheer volume of maps compiled by the Board of Trade and to engage directly with many more of these documents than could be reproduced in print. Perhaps the most innovative feature of the online collection is that all sources are superimposed over a modern global satellite map, allowing readers to visualize the varying scales of maps—both the comparative physical size of each document and the extent of space depicted therein.

Edelson does well in showing how, by commissioning maps, the British Empire became beguiled by a false impression of its own control (p. 12). Dynamic spaces became static, vast expanses shrank to a single sheet of paper, and purportedly scientific documents masked an ideological agenda. In reality, boundaries on maps shifted before the ink had dried, maps proved unable to stop enterprising colonists (including future U.S. President George Washington) from acting on their expansionary ambitions, and fortune-seeking sugar planters often encountered rocky, hilly terrain rather than the lush, fertile plots they saw on maps. Premised on such deceptive notions of space, Edelson asserts, the Board of Trade's mission to reform settler colonialism was doomed from the start, the surviving maps a testament to the chasm between ideology and reality.

Yet the significance of the Board of Trade lies not in its mission to remake British North America. Rather, in working to develop and implement its new vision and by vividly illustrating it in a collection of hundreds of maps, the Board of Trade “framed every serious discussion of American policy” with a new “language of empire” that highlighted a fundamental dissonance between the expectations of American colonists and the needs of the British metropole (p. 337). Maps that, to British officials, bespoke order and productivity, to Americans, threatened to reduce “colonial subject-hood to acts of production and consumption” (p. 342). Thus, Edelson suggests, new British maps of empire “laid the foundation for a continental consciousness” in America that pushed the colonists toward revolution (p. 301).

A New Map of Empire represents an important contribution to both the digital humanities and existing literature on the origins of the American Revolution. Future research might analyze the circulation of these maps throughout the thirteen colonies or explore colonial impressions of and interactions with these documents below the level of politicians and diplomats. Edelson's online database provides an invaluable tool for scholars to pursue these and many other questions related to both the history of cartography and contesting conceptions of space in British North America.