Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic, by Catherine Gibson

Specialists in Russian and East European cartography and historical geography will already be familiar with Catherine Gibson’s research from a series of cogent, carefully researched and elegantly crafted journal articles. This excellent monograph, which is based on her Ph.D. thesis at the European University Institute, now thoroughly revised and expanded, integrates elements of her earlier published work but also substantially widens its scope and deepens its analysis. The book examines the sponsorship, production, circulation and reception of ethnographic maps in the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the many ways in which these maps shaped Baltic societies’ conceptions of their own place in the empire, in Europe, and globally.

At the heart of this profoundly scholarly—yet also lively and accessible—work is an abundance of thematic and geographical maps (many included in the volume as full-colour illustrations), which Gibson shows were instrumental in constructing and communicating different views of demographic and ethnolinguistic distributions and divisions of territory, and of nationhood. Statisticians used maps as a research tool that gave ‘meaning to numerical data and illuminated bigger spatial patterns’ (p. 2). Tsarist administrators used maps to aggregate, classify and demarcate populations and to legitimise existing territorial configurations. Educationalists used maps to consolidate and promote national identities and aspirations. Through these maps, Gibson argues, the Baltic nationalities constructed and came to know themselves and their homelands: ‘By presenting populations in spatial terms and inscribing them onto the landscape, the territories occupied by ethnolinguistic groups and the divisions between them were presented as occurring in nature and outside of history, even while their promoters often looked to history to justify their claims’ (p. 4).

The monograph is divided into an Introduction, five chapters and a brief Epilogue. In the Introduction, Gibson frames her study theoretically and situates it historically and historiographically, drawing on a wide and rich literature on Baltic, Russian imperial and wider European history. Building on recent scholarship, Gibson proposes that we need to move beyond containing Baltic histories within national(ist) narratives. Rather, she argues, ‘the history of the Baltic provinces needs to be understood within a broader framework of Eastern European imperial borderlands’ (p. 12). To do this, we must incorporate imperial and transnational perspectives ‘into what we see, look for, and listen to’ (p. 12). We must also consider map-making not solely as a formal scientific undertaking but also as a social process and experience. By studying informal mapping as well as professional cartography, the flows of resources and funding that governed the supply and marketing of maps, and the consumption and reception of maps in diverse settings, Gibson notes, the historian can gain unique insight into the complex and reciprocal ‘entanglements and cross-border interactions’ (p. 13) between the Baltic provinces and western Russia, the erosion of existing imperial geographies, and the emergence of alternative visions of space, place, and belonging at the edge of empire.

Each chapter offers a case-study of a particular theme in a specific chronological context. Chapter One looks at Peter von Köppen’s ‘Ethnographic Map of European Russia’, published by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in 1852 in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, to trace transnational scientific networks and the circulation of ideas, technologies and finance that stimulated and underwrote ethnographic mapping in the second half of the century. The success of von Köppen’s work did much to popularise the use of maps to visualise ethnic data. Yet, Gibson argues, maps were not at this point created—or regarded by their readers—as rhetorical devices purporting to offer a truthful representation of reality, but as means of generating, organising and presenting new knowledge. Chapter Two shifts the perspective from Russian imperial elites and institutions in mid-century to Baltic administrators and statisticians in the 1860s and 1870s. Gibson’s analysis demonstrates how, in the absence of adequate government funding, regional projects of ethnographic mapping—understood as a complex, fraught process of ‘triangulating religion, language, and nationality’ (p. 73)—came increasingly to depend upon the co-operation of printing and publishing entrepreneurs, whose motivations and interests frequently diverged from their own.

In Chapter Three, Gibson moves to the end of the nineteenth century, sensitively and subtly parsing debates between pan-Slavic and pan-Germanic ideologues about the spatial identity of the Baltic provinces. By this point, thematic maps were increasingly deployed as arguments for or against a case: mapmakers, Gibson asserts, now ‘used their maps to construct compelling cartographic narratives to persuade their audiences of how to see, think—and ultimately, act’ (p. 94). Gibson provides lively and engaging readings of a variety of regional and local maps, tracing the tricks and techniques that their creators used not merely to represent, but to normalise and legitimate their values, visions, fears and dreams.

The next chapter considers how Estonian- and Latvian-speakers in the Baltic region at the start of the twentieth century began to challenge the dominant Germanic, Slavic and Polish constructions of Baltic space through their own cartographic initiatives. These ‘vernacular’ mapping activities proliferated, inspiring a new regional map-culture that articulated the Baltic people’s own ‘cultural particularism’ (p. 131) and fed an incipient sense of nationhood—but not yet of statehood—based on distinct ethnolinguistic identities. Once the Baltic states had acquired independence, following the First World War, cartographers played an active role, of course, in defining and demarcating their new national borders. This period is the focus of the final chapter. Here Gibson offers rich accounts of how the new Latvian and Estonian governments used maps to advocate publicly for their territorial demands and of the work of the border commissions responsible for translating lines on diplomatic treaty maps into boundary-posts on the ground. She also offers a highly original analysis of the agency of local communities—already map-literate and immersed in popular map-culture, as described in the previous chapter—in the border-drawing process and of their interactions with national governments and international advisors and mediators. Her case-study of Estonian Valga/Latvian Valka shows with exemplary clarity how these ‘different stakeholders used ethnographic mapping to make territorial claims on the basis of nationality’ (p. 178). Among the maps discussed in this chapter are hand-drawn sketches made by local residents to communicate and advocate for their own ‘micro-geographies’ of identity, belonging and also economic interest, at district and individual household and homestead scales. These maps, Gibson notes in a striking phrase, revealed ‘the spatial syntax of relations between people, land, and natural resources’ (p. 209).

Gibson’s work is imaginatively conceived, grounded in meticulous, rigorous and formidably multilingual archival research in nine countries, clearly structured, elegantly written, and cogently argued. The volume is finely produced. It is essential reading for historians and historical geographers of modern Eastern Europe, as well as for specialists in borderland studies, nationalism and national identity, the role of science in imperial governance, and the social, political and cultural history of cartography. Thanks to its accessible style and engaging exposition, it will also appeal to general readers interested in Baltic history and in maps as persuasive images and meaningful objects.