Maps are a peculiar kind of visual text. Their mundane practicality makes them appear to be mere instruments of utility, which tell us where we are going, and puts everything into its proper place. But their utility comes packaged with invisible ingredients, which make their instrumentality not only culturally complex but also historically disturbing.
The most powerful of all the invisible things in maps are the feelings that suffuse them, ie, feelings of territorial attachments. The most apparent of these cartographic passions are national ones, but in every city and town, street kids, real estate agents and insurance companies also have strong feelings about their local maps. Zoning boards, planners and electoral constituencies invest maps with local politics. Landowners love their property lines. Universities and colleges depict their campus identity with maps, and the logo of the Association for Asian Studies is a map of Asia, which depicts a particular territory of Asian studies scholarship.
As invisible as the sentiments lurking in maps are the social relations of mapping, which produce maps and authorise their interpretation, and whose most influential architects work in national institutions, including schools, colleges and universities. The ubiquity of state-authorised mapping is now so complete that most governments do not regulate most map-making, yet almost everyone draws official lines on maps by habit anyway. This habit represents the mapping-hegemony of the national state, a force so invisible, pervasive and widely accepted that most people never think about it, which indicates the global expanse of the national state´s territorial authority.
The internal and external boundaries of national states are now so familiar, because they are so often seen, that they appear as virtually natural features of the globe. This virtual reality came into being in the 19th century, as industrial technologies for surveying the earth and producing statistics, and for mass-printing, mass-reading, and mass-education, began to make viewing standardised maps a common experience. Making maps, reading maps, talking about maps and thinking with maps-in-the-mind became increasingly common with each passing decade. By 1950, people around the world had substantial map-knowledge in common. Today, it may well be imagined that most people in the world – including illiterate people – share common map-knowledge, because they routinely experience various versions of exactly the same maps.