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Tagged: 19th century

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From Fieldwork in Japan to Print: The Reciprocal Relationship between Johannes Justus Rein and the Perthes Publishing House

On a winter morning in 1875, the geographer Johannes Justus Rein was staying at the German Legation in Tokyo. For over a year, Rein had been conducting field research in Japan under the auspices of a government-sponsored expedition. In a letter to August Petermann (10 January 1875), he outlined his plans for the scholarly evaluation of his fieldwork upon return...

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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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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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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...

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Mapping Japan: Bruno Hassenstein’s Map of the “Surroundings of Tokyo Bay and of the Volcano Fuji-No-Yama” (1879)

In 1879, the scientific journal Dr. A. Petermann’s Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt (PGM) presented its readers with a detailed map of the Tokyo Bay area and Mount Fuji, offering more geographical information than other European maps of this region. This map, entitled The Surroundings of Tokyo Bay and of the Volcano Fuji-No-Yama (fig. 1), was the work of...

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Emphasising the Unknown. The Emergence of Blank Spaces on 19th-century Maps of Africa

European exploration of Africa in the 19th century was based on the assumption that only little was known about the interior of the continent. For decades, geographical societies, cartographers, travellers and others repeatedly emphasised that the maps consisted of little more than just blank spaces which should be filled out in order to open up new trade opportunities, extend political...