Social and Political Landscapes within European Colonial Maps

During the fifteenth century, Europeans began to explore the seas, eventually establishing colonial empires throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As part of a systematic approach to document and claim these “new” lands, Europeans produced lists, studies, illustrations, and maps. This practice is visualized in Giovanni Botero’s seventeenth century map of the Americas, which is a diagram heavily labeled with sites names associated with European history and culture. These historic narratives and reports about the Americas typically describe indigenous communities as deviant, violent, and uncivilized in every way. For example, Alain Manesson Mallet’s map Mexique Ou Nouvelle Espagne (1683) depicts two groups involved in a violent altercation, which likely infers tensions or fears that existed between Europeans and indigenous Americans. My examination of European colonial maps of the Americas focuses on the social landscape of colonized spaces through a lens of the absence presence of erased history. In other words, I trace how European colonial maps contributed to the development of systems of power in the Americas, as well as established a codified visual language in support of these systems, that later materialized in colonial landscape paintings.