Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475-1600 (Space, Place, and Society)

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Summary: How Maps made the world a commodity
Review: Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475-1600 by John Rennie Short (Space, Place, and Society: Syracuse University Press) In his newest work, John Rennie Short continues to explore how the spatial discourses of the sixteenth century formed a remarkable revolution that changed the way the world was represented. The cosmos was bound in a sphere. The world was gridded and plotted, the seas navigated, and the land was surveyed. Spatial practices were codified, a spatial sensitivity was created, and a cartographic literacy was established through the increasing use of maps and the creation of a cartographic language for new map-pings of the world, state, and city.
Short establishes that such spatial revisioning is connected to the promotion of commercial and national interests. Developments in navigation, for example, were often encouraged and promoted by both the state and merchant companies. Surveying was closely connected to the rising cost of land and the increasing commodification of agriculture. The long price rise of land in the sixteenth century was an important factor in developing the spatial practices of map-ping and surveying. In addition, Short highlights the role of occult practices in the new spatial sciences. The cosmographers of the sixteenth century encompassed a wide arc of intellectual endeavors.
Excerpt: Modern space-the space the modern world inhabits and `sees'-was created in Europe between 1475 and 1600. It was produced using a variety of means, including the use of the grid to plot the world; the use of the cosmographical sphere as the starting point for the mathematically derived practices of navigation and surveying; the increasing use of maps; and the creation of a cartographic language for new mappings of the world, states, and cities. In this new spatial practice, the world was enmeshed in a grid, laced with compass lines and seen through the lens of the theodolite, back-staff, and cross-staff. New techniques of spatial surveillance were employed by the state, private companies, and powerful individuals in acts of land commodification and colonial appropriation.
The space in which most of the contemporary world is viewed, a gridded space empty of history yet full of promise, was constructed in Europe between 1475 and 1600. This period marks a transition zone between two differing views of space. The first view saw space and time as being deeply intertwined, with history as well as geography forming an important part of geographical representation. The second view, however, began to visualize a space more independent of history. These views do not constitute a simple dichotomy between an easily demarcated "before" and "after." The medieval period was not an unchanging block, and the Renaissance was deeply marked by a medieval heritage. How-ever, it is possible to discern the construction of a modern space of the grid, the map, and the survey. Plotted on the grid of latitude and longitude, this new world was produced on maps and negotiated in new methods in navigation and surveying that allowed the world to be not only seen but also explored and appropriated.
Mapping was never politically neutral or socially indeterminate. The Renaissance introduced a new way of seeing the world, describing the world, and mapping the world that anticipated both the Enlightenment and colonialism. Maps of the Renaissance reflect and embody new forms of scientific understanding and new techniques of territorial appropriation.