This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live. Going beyond the focus of traditional cartography, the book draws on examples of the use of maps from the sixteenth century to the present, including their role in projects of the national and colonial state, emergent capitalism and the planetary consciousness of the natural sciences. It also considers the use of maps for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health, disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and the transparent earth.

John Pickles is Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Part1. Introduction 1. Maps and Worlds Part 2. Deconstructing the Map 2. What Do Maps Represent? The Crisis of Representation and the Critique of Cartographic Reason 3. Situated pragmatics: Maps and Mapping as Social Practice Part 3. The Over-Coded World: A Genealogy of Modern Mapping 4. The Cartographic Gaze, Global Visions, and Modalities of Visual Culture 5. Cadasters and Capitalism: The Emergence of a New Map Consciousness 6. Mapping the Geo-Body: State, Territory, and Nation 7. Commodity and Control: Technologies of the Social Body Part 4. Investing Bodies in Depth 8. Cyber-Empires: Cartographic Reason and the Technological Sublime in a Digital Age Part 5. Conclusion 9. Counter-Mappings: Cartographic Reason in the Age of Intelligent Machines and Smart Bombs