Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2023 Baltic Geopolitics Network Publication Prize, University of Cambridge.
• Winner of Winner, 2023 Baltic Geopolitics Network Publication Prize.

Overview

Geographies of Nationhood examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies. Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.

Full Product Details

9780192844323

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Reviews

highly relevant * Katja Wezel, H-Soz-Kult * In this book, Geographies of Nationhood, Catherine Gibson presents a piece of intellectual history that analyzes how these societies produced and used ethnographic maps of what is today Latvia and Estonia...The book should therefore become an important read for many scholars and students of Baltic and east European studies. * Vasilijus Safronovas, Journal Of Baltic Studies * Catherine Gibson's Geographies of Nationhood takes the reader on a journey through the intricate history of ethnographic mapmaking in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire from the 1840s until the formation of the independent Baltic states following World War I...The book opens up a fresh window into the history of the Baltic region, but it has wider lessons to teach. * Katja Bruisch, Isis Book Review *

highly relevant * Katja Wezel, H-Soz-Kult *

Author Information

Catherine Gibson is a historian of modern Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. She is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Tartu. She received her PhD from the European University Institute in 2019. She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Borders, and Identities and her research has appeared in the journals Past & Present, Journal of Social History, Journal of History Geography, and Nationalities Papers.

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