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Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800–1945).
A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha

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The Turkestan Album: War and Peace of Maps and Photographs

The Russian campaign in Central Asia can be viewed as an episode in the long history of this territory. Claiming the city of Tashkent in 1865, the fortress of Samarkand in 1868 and the Khanate of Khiva in 1873 were all ground-breaking events of Central Asia’s incorporation into the Russian Empire (cf. fig. 1), impulsive and unsystematic as it was....

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A Colonial Demarcation Process. Investigating the Formation of the British-German Border between Nigeria and Cameroon

In 1903 a complaint by a British official about “leaking German-Cameroonian borders” (Weiss 2000: 168) reached Garoua, the centre of German colonial administration in German-Adamawa, Cameroon. More complaints from the British Protectorate of Nigeria followed but German officials rejected the accusations although they were aware of the ongoing slavery and cross-border slave trade (ibid.: 167–172). Why did the colonial border...

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Josef Menges and the Early Mapping of Somaliland

Josef Menges and German Exploration in the Horn of Africa Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the coastal territories of the Horn of Africa became the focus of increasing interest by foreign powers, agencies, and individuals, who were attracted by the logistical, commercial, and geopolitical potential of these territories. Josef Menges (1850–1910), a Hessian, was one of...

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The Emergence of the Emin Pasha Gulf (Tanzania) as an Object of Hydrographic Knowledge

Africa’s largest lake, known to this day by its colonial name Lake Victoria, features an indentation in the south-west that many texts and maps refer to as Emin Pasha Gulf (Fig. 1). Located in the Tanzanian part of the lake, this indentation has a surface area of around 2,600 square kilometres and thus is about five times the size of...

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A Cartographer in the Archives. Ernst Debes’ Manuscript Map of Eduard Rüppell’s Abyssinian Journey (1867)

Maps are made from maps. This can also be traced in August Petermann’s commentary for his latest map of Northern Abyssinia in 1867, published in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen (PGM). The senior cartographer of the Perthes publishing house in Gotha stated that an entirely new map had been made from a journey undertaken by Eduard Rüppell to this very area 35...