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Geographies of Contact

 | 
Caroline Lehni
, 
Fanny Moghaddassi
, 
Hélène Ibata
, 
et al.

II. Mapping the Orient

Conflicted Cartographies of a Peninsula: Deconstructing Fraser Hunter’s 1908 Map of Arabia

Daniel Foliard

Texte intégral

  • 1 India Office, The India List and India Office List, London, Harrison, 1905, p. 31. On Fraser Hunter (...)
  • 2 The Survey of India was the mapping agency of the British government in India.
  • 3 The Indian Political Service was a department of the British government in India. Its officers were (...)
  • 4 Frederick Fraser Hunter, “Reminiscences of the Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf”, The Geographica (...)
  • 5 Ibid.

1It took Frederick Fraser Hunter (1876-1959) months of a long winter in Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, to draw an up-to-date map of Arabia for the Indian government (Fig. 1).1 Hunter had joined the Survey of India in 1905 after years of service in the Indian Army.2 He was friends with William Shakespear (1878-1915). This resourceful Anglo-Indian officer became the youngest consul in the Indian Political Service by the early twentieth century when he was appointed in the Persian Gulf. Hunter’s relations thus placed him within a network of Anglo-Indian intelligencers that shaped British policies in Persia, Mesopotamia and Arabia.3 British India had then carved out its own sphere of influence in the area; its geopolitical priorities could sometimes clash with strategic views in London. Mapping Arabia therefore amounted to much more than disinterested science. It was part and parcel of India’s promotion of its ascendancy in the region. Hunter worked strenuously, in consultation with Maurice O’Connor Tandy and John Gordon Lorimer, his colleagues from the Indian Survey. The map was completed by the spring of 1906. As noted by the main architect of the cartographic document, Fraser Hunter himself, his attainment raised little enthusiasm at first. Members of the Survey of India were told by the War Office that “the only thing Hunter’s map was good for was “to turn face to the wall.’”4 Yet, prominent figures of British geography, such as David G. Hogarth, paid homage to the cartographer’s accomplishments a few years later.5 Despite its flaws, Hunter’s map of Arabia was one of the first attempts at compiling the most recent data to fill the blanks on the charts of the peninsula in decades. Singling out this cartographic document is not a random selection: Hunter’s Map of Arabia testified to the British Raj’s intensified attention to this part of the Middle East in the early twentieth century. George Curzon, then Viceroy of India, toured the Persian Gulf in 1903. Curzon’s diplomatic tour celebrated years of a successful interventionist policy that fostered India’s influence in the region. Hunter’s cartographic concern was one of the many manifestations of the increased interest in the area on the part of British India.

Figure 1: F. Fraser Hunter, Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, Survey of India, 1908, scale 1 inch/48 miles, 90 x 65 cm, BNF, GE BB-137. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  • 6 John Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton, B (...)
  • 7 John Brian Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”, Cartographica, vol. 26, no. 2, 1989.

2Maps, to use Brian Harley’s words, are not a “passive reflection of the world of objects”, but a “refracted image contributing to a dialogue in a socially constructed world.”6 From that perspective, Hunter’s mapping of Arabia was the product of a nexus of social, technical and intellectual mechanisms which this article sets out to situate and deconstruct.7 It aims at unveiling the motives behind the geographic and geopolitical construction of the Peninsula in the early twentieth century. Hunter and Lorimer compiled a variety of sources: each exemplifies a dimension of the intellectual comprehension of Arabia by the West in general, and British India in particular. I will discuss the underlying assumptions that contributed to the making of the map, as well as the various meanings ascribed to this particular regional construction. To explore the fabric of this map, I will consider the works compiled by the cartographer in order to demonstrate the fragmented nature of British knowledge on the area. The central importance of indigenous information to the construction of topographical and geographical knowledge will also be underscored. The ineluctable dialogue with the local inhabitants was a decisive dimension in the collection of accurate intelligence.

Collecting and sharing knowledge: maps and their flaws

  • 8 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.

3The nature of Western knowledge in a colonial context has been extensively investigated in the last decades. Conventional wisdom considers that surveying, cartographically, photographically, or statistically, was one of the expressions of imperial power.8 Nineteenthand twentieth-century European maps are often considered to be perfect illustrations of the supposedly cumulative progress which materialized Britain’s and Europe’s grasp on the globe. Cartography, which was an instrument of governance since the modern era, was indeed given a new significance in the age of high imperialism from the second half of the nineteenth century. The mapping process which accompanied the expansion of British power on a global scale certainly functioned as an imperial discourse. It played a critical role in objectifying foreign influence. Systematic surveys in India, or cadastral enterprises in the dependencies, were all visualizations of European control and authority. Yet, the gap between self-legitimation and actual dominance could be wide. Maps, statistics and the various components of British knowledge only gave the impression of control. The study of Hunter’s map of Arabia exemplifies these discrepancies between cartographic discourses and effective power.

  • 9 See John J. Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in t (...)
  • 10 Royal Geographical Society, The Capt. William H. I. Shakespear Collection, 1914 notebook, file 91/4

4Unlike Lorimer, Hunter was an armchair cartographer. He first explored Arabia years after the completion of his map of the Peninsula. His grasp of the territory depended on data collected by others on the field. Even though the process of compilation geography was a long-established tradition and in no way exceptional, the lack of first-hand experience of the field was considered a defect in an era when heroic terrain geography superseded other forms of geographic discourses. Hunter had to rely on a very wide and chaotic range of sources, which added to the difficulties inherent to his very indirect experience of the geography of Arabia. What’s more, none of them was a truly systematic survey. Very few geodetic surveys were implemented in the nineteenth-century Near East. There was one in Mesopotamia in the 1850s and another in Palestine in the 1870s.9 But they remained exceptions. As a rule, most surveys of an unknown country were route traverses, or “compass traverses,” which were of a very low order. Once the first station’s coordinates (point A) were fixed, the explorer would take measurements at his next stop (point B). The length of a first line segment (AB) could be calculated. Each day of exploration would add another set of coordinates, so that a succession of stations and segments would be created. The surveyor then computed linear and angular measurements along these lines to create a route map. This was an intrinsically erroneous process. The margin of error was large, even for the most seasoned surveyors, the calibration of the instruments defective, the rough field notes generally jotted down and rarely standardized. Altimetry readings were specifically inaccurate. The instruments often had a large initial error which was difficult to ascertain correctly. A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, who was struggling to correct the measurements made by Capt. William Shakespear during his 1914 survey of the Nejd, complained that the explorer’s aneroid bar “obviously had a large initial error which had never been correctly ascertained.”10 Pacing was one of the few solutions to measure distances. Perambulators were too expensive and heavy to be used on a regular basis in difficult terrains such as the Arabian Peninsula. Eastern travellers had to rely on the regular pace of camels. There again, some of these faithful creatures could be slow, others marched well: the route survey gave a very uncertain grasp on the country.

  • 11 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 361.

5The fragmented nature of data collection was not Hunter’s only problem. While the cabinet topographer’s first task was to assess the quality of contradictory and ill-informed intelligence, he also had to fight the nineteenth-century cartographer’s natural tendency to fill in the blanks with his own imagination. And even when the author did not try to mask his ignorance at the drafting stage, map printing could prove another source of errors. In that regard, Hunter provides a revealing anecdote in his article. The Persia sheet of the 1912 Survey of India Southern Asia series depicted a hill nobody had ever heard of: someone in the publishing office had inadvertently poured betel-juice on the proof copies of the map.11 The cumulative effect of these various restraints on the cartographer’s craft made most maps of partially known countries scientific only in name. The power of cartography remained an imperial fantasy in a pre-World War I world where very few tracts of land in Africa or the Middle East were accurately surveyed. Hunter’s map provides a telling example of such limitations. It is a palimpsest composed of fragments of more or less reliable sources which I will now examine.

Documenting Yemen

  • 12 See Hunter, “Reminiscences”.
  • 13 Robert J. Gavin, Aden under British Rule, 1839-1967, London, Hurst, 1975, pp. 36-8.

6Hunter heavily relied on the topographic and cartographic material produced by agents working with the British Residency in Aden in order to document the southeastern part of the Peninsula.12 The port was conquered in 1830 by the East India Company. Samuel B. Haines, a hydrographer from the Indian Navy, convinced the Bombay government of the commanding position of Aden on the Red Sea. The annexation of the future coaling station was sanctioned ex post facto. Haines became its first Political Resident.13 He immediately encouraged the members of the Arabian Coast Survey to proceed with further surveys. Over the years, the exploration and charting of the Gulf region and the Rea Sea answered the Indian sub-empire’s strategic need for better control of the sea routes to the subcontinent. It became a protectorate in 1873. While Hunter could not ignore this early data, he also used more recent surveys.

  • 14 Part of Bury’s papers are kept in the British Library, see IOR/L/PS/10/135. Bury published a book b (...)
  • 15 Hunter mentioned Bury’s work on several occasions. See Newton, Kipling’s Canadian.

7The cartographer was fortunate enough to find up-to-date geographical intelligence in George Wyman Bury’s works.14 Hunter had a specific interest for Bury’s explorations on the fringes of the Empty Quarter (the Rub’al-Khali desert in South Arabia): he had unsuccessfully tried to gather funds and official support for his own trans-Arabian expedition before he started working on the map.15 Bury was one of the first Westerners to survey the little-explored Hadramaut region. Wyman Bury first arrived in Aden in 1896. He was recruited as a soldier by the British Residency and actively participated in the repression of Aden’s tribal uprisings in 1903. He then explored southwestern Arabia for a little less than a decade without any official sanction after he was accused of accepting bribes. His explorations aimed to determine the status of tribal networks and sovereignty in the hinterland. He went where few Westerners had ever been before, going as far as standing on the threshold of the unexplored Rub’al-Khali. Despite his dismissal from the Residence, his attainments were indirectly encouraged by a group of supporters, including the Royal Geographical Society and the Indian government.

  • 16 Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, London, Longma (...)
  • 17 Keith Edward Abbott, “Geographical Notes, Taken During a Journey in Persia in 1849 and 1850”, Journ (...)
  • 18 Denis Wright, The English Amongst the Persians: Imperial Lives in Nineteenth-Century Iran, London, (...)
  • 19 Eric Macro, “George Wyman Bury South Arabian Pioneer”, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studi (...)

8Bury’s case is significant of the advent of a new archetype of explorer. Most Victorian surveyors in Arabia did not try to hide their Western origins. Richard Burton, who visited Mecca as a Pashtu pilgrim in 1853, was an exception in that regard.16 The Victorian frame of mind was not yet prepared for figures such as T. E. Lawrence. There was a desire to distinguish between the Western explorer and the explored. Take, for example, Keith Edward Abbott (1814-1873), the British consul in Persia in the 1840s and 1850s. He was a productive geographer, yet Whitehall disapproved of his ostensible adoption of Eastern ways and outfits.17 He was thought to be an “out-and-out Persian”: a unique position if there was one in the mid-nineteenth century.18 Most mid-and late-Victorian explorers in the East were ostensibly Western. Bury, on the contrary, participated in the development of a new approach to exploration. He chose to blend into the landscape. He dressed as a native, spoke fluent dialectal Arabic and lived for many years in the Yemeni hinterland: he had “gone native” to use a phrase which appeared in the early twentieth century.19 For local inhabitants, he was Abdullah Mansur. Bury’s transformation into “a native” was not an isolated case. Gerard Leachman (1880-1920), an agent recruited in 1909 by Percy Cox (1864-1937), a British resident in the Gulf, is another example of these evolutions. He was sent to Central Arabia to make contact with the Ibn Rashid dynasty. Like Bury, Leachman was working without any official mandate, yet with informal support from India and the War Office. Like Bury, he dressed as a local inhabitant and spoke fluent Arabic. This new model explorer was at first looked upon with suspicion, but Bury certainly paved the way for colourful and heroic figures such as St. John Philby or T. E. Lawrence. The review of Hunter’s sources reveals how a new generation of agents started to participate in the collection of upto-date information from the early twentieth century onward. The changing nature of fieldwork provided the cartographer with accurate data on what were considered the remotest parts of the world at the time. He was significantly one of the few officials to openly use Bury’s work. His mapmaking legitimated these new regimes of exploration.

Locating the Persian Gulf: the Indian Political Service and its sub-empire

  • 20 James Onley, “The Raj Reconsidered: British India’s Informal Empire and Spheres of Influence in Asi (...)

9The creation of Hunter’s map brings to light another feature of the nature of British knowledge and influence in the Peninsula. As shown in the list of his references published in his 1919 article, the cartographer could not overlook the impressive amount of data collected over the years by the officers of the Indian Political Service and their agents. Officers in the Indian Political Service often administered vast areas with a relative degree of autonomy. This was specifically true in the Gulf where the “Politicals” had carved a sphere of influence for the Raj from the second half of the nineteenth century.20 They enjoyed much more freedom of action than other officials in the formal Empire. With no one to contradict their reports and expertise, they had a quasi-monopoly on the production of information on the regions under their control. Their surveys, maps and reports participated in the elaboration of the family states along the Trucial Coast, a significant component of the Raj’s informal sub-empire.

  • 21 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 360.
  • 22 Samuel B. Miles, “On the Route between Sohár and El-Bereymí in Omán, with a Note on the Zatt, or Gy (...)
  • 23 Samuel B. Miles, “On the Border of the Great Desert: A Journey in Oman (Continued)”, The Geographic (...)
  • 24 Samuel B. Miles, “Journey from Gwadur to Karachi”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of Lon (...)
  • 25 Hilal Hajari, “Oman through British Eyes British Travel Writing on Oman from 1800 to 1970”, unpubli (...)

10In order to draw Southeast Arabia, Hunter used Maurice O’Connor Tandy’s map of Oman among many other sources. Tandy, an officer of the Indian Survey, relied in its turn on data gathered by other officers of the Indian Political Service such as Samuel B. Miles (1838-1914).21 Miles was the Political Agent in Oman from 1874 onward. He indefatigably surveyed the area under his administration with great professionalism, a feature of many officers in the India Political Service.22 He knew how to use topographic instruments such as thermometers, barometers and telescopes.23 He consistently recorded his readings and measurements in notebooks.24 Not only did he collect a wealth of information on Oman’s topography, but he was also very careful in identifying the most loyal supporters of the Raj’s influence in the area.25 The classification of tribes and leaders was an essential facet of the work of the Political Service in Arabia. Miles and Tandy were among the many agents who relentlessly sent a stream of data from the Persian Gulf to India. The accuracy of Hunter’s map therefore materialized the Anglo-Indian expertise and influence over the area. It participated in transforming Arabia, the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf into strategic territories in the eyes of both British India and the metropole itself.

  • 26 Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire (...)
  • 27 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 356.
  • 28 Frederick Fraser Hunter, Notes on the Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, with a General Index of P (...)

11The assertion of India’s grasp on Arabia was indicative of the underlying structures that oriented British influence in the Middle East.26 Conflicting views and assumptions presided over the shaping of Britain’s policies in the region. Various actors claimed to have a say in their definition. Contemporary questions on Hunter’s system of transliteration reflected these internal divisions. As stated earlier, the map of Arabia was at first much criticized both by the War Office and the Survey of India for its supposed inaccuracies. Hunter was blamed for his system of transliteration which he had to abandon in later versions of his map. This was more than just a scholarly discussion on Arabic translations. Hunter was caught in bureaucratic wars between the Egyptian Survey, the Indian Political Service, the Indian Survey itself and the War Office in London. Struggles over place names testified to wider interdepartmental competitions.27 The parties involved in shaping the area in the early twentieth century promoted new categories, new frames of reference to outline British influence in the region. Toponymy and maps actualized these evolutions and mirrored the emergence of new sub-imperial spheres of influence in the Middle East. Hunter published an index of place names to accompany the map in which, for instance, Kuwait was given an almost final and authoritative spelling.28 This was by no means anecdotal. Britain had signed an agreement with a Kuwaiti leader, Mubarak Al-Sabah, in 1899, with a view to tightening its ties with this province. This was partly a response to German plans to build a railway from Berlin to Bagdad in order to establish a port at the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates. In a context of growing tensions between Ottomans and London in the Gulf, placing and naming Kuwait on a British map was hardly mere topography. It was a claim in itself.

  • 29 See George C. Gore, On the Projection for a Map of India and Adjacent Countries on the Scale of 1:1 (...)
  • 30 See India Office Records (British Library), IOR: L/PS/10/259: correspondence about Hunter, 1910.
  • 31 Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922, New H (...)

12Hunter’s map, moreover, adopted a new perspective on Arabia. Hunter applied George C. Gore’s modified secant conical projection which diminished the distortion induced by more traditional projections in later versions of the document.29 His map figured a more realistic Arabia than was the case in nineteenth-century cartography: a territory as large as Greenland on the route to India. The document participated in materializing the strategic significance of the Peninsula.30 Arabia was not only the exotic place where the bold could explore an untouched and ancient land, it also had economic value and was to be precisely located and named. Hunter’s enterprise therefore echoed early twentieth-century attempts at promoting new categories to describe the region such as the phrase “Middle East” which was adopted by George Curzon’s entourage in the wake of his tour of the Persian Gulf in 1903.31

Musil and Huber: colonial competition in the Peninsula and internationalism

  • 32 Hunter, Notes, pp. 1-3.
  • 33 Charles Huber, Journal d’un voyage en Arabie (1883-1884), Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1891. Fraser (...)
  • 34 Gérald Arboit, “Un Jésuite au service de la France du Second Empire: les missions du Père Cohen dan (...)

13Hunter’s computations of heights and coordinates were largely based on the work of a French archaeologist named Charles Huber (1847-1884).32 Huber was sent by the French Ministère de l’Instruction Publique to Arabia in 1878. He went on a second mission to the Peninsula in 1883-1884 to recover the Teima Stone, a fifth-century B. C. votive stele, with the support of the Société de Géographie. He was murdered by members of his expedition while in Arabia. Hunter refers to his notes which were posthumously published in 1891.33 Huber was not as politically influential as his British counterparts sometimes were. His enterprise was one of the many expressions of European crave for archaeological trophies and repatriation of looted artefacts. Yet his presence in Arabia was also indirect evidence of a consistent interest of the French Second Empire in the region. For instance, William G. Palgrave, an ex-soldier in the Bombay Native Infantry who became a Jesuit and a staunch supporter of the exploration of the interior of Arabia, had contacted the French government in the 1860s to offer his services years earlier.34 France was looking for allies in the Peninsula; Palgrave was to help establish a Franco-Wahhabi alliance to counter British influence in the Gulf but the scheme failed. Huber’s expeditions, though not instrumental in shaping French policies in the region, contributed to a series of uncoordinated attempts to thwart the supremacy of British intelligence in the Peninsula.

  • 35 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 361. Alois Musil, “Karte Von Arabia Petraea”, Wien, Alfred Hölder, 1906 (...)
  • 36 Alois Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, New York, American Geographical Society (...)
  • 37 See Erich Feigl, Musil Von Arabien: Vorkämpher Der Islamischen Welt, Wien, Amalthea, 1985.

14Hunter also relied on the publications of Alois Musil, a Czech-born Orientalist, such as his Karte von Arabia Petrea (1906).35 The document filled in the blanks on the map in the north of the Peninsula. Musil secured the protection of some of the most important tribes of Northern Arabia, such as the Ruwala, which gave him unprecedented access to the area.36 He was working for Austria-Hungary despite British attempts at convincing him to work for Whitehall. Musil helped Franz-Ferdinand develop connections with local leaders. Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme even joined one of his expeditions in Syria in 1912, yet another trace of Musil’s connections with the Austrian leadership.37 The list of Hunter’s sources therefore demonstrates how Anglo-German and Anglo-French competition characterized European interventionism in early-twentieth-century Arabia. His map of Arabia illustrates one of the facets of these rivalries: the Indian Survey, pressed by Curzon and other promoters of an interventionist policy in the Peninsula, had succeeded in publishing the first up-to-date map of Arabia in the twentieth century. Once again, this was a message sent to other European Powers.

  • 38 Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of Inter (...)
  • 39 See “Asie Turque”, Annales de Géographie, no. 20, 1911, p. 198.

15Paradoxically, Hunter’s extensive use of Musil’s or Huber’s data testifies to the fact that the intensity of colonial competition over the region did not stop strategically valuable cartographic information from circulating widely. There was no such thing as a systematic culture of secrecy that would have prevented sensitive information from being spread before the First World War. In a context of increasing tensions between Germany and other European powers, one might have expected Musil to retain part of the ethnographical and topographical intelligence he had been able to collect in the East. Charles Huber’s accurate measurements could translate into a hitherto unprecedented comprehension of the Peninsula’s topography. Both explorers brought back information that could have put their State of origin at an advantage. Intelligence secrecy could have been the rule. Yet their works and maps were available for everyone. This demonstrates that Imperial rivalries did not always impede on the denationalizing forces at play within European scientific communities in the late nineteenth century.38 While it is undeniable that geography and cartography were among the many tools of imperial expansion, it must be reminded that the colonial age witnessed many attempts to internationalize geography. As early as 1871, the first International Geographical Congress in Antwerp considered the establishment of the International Geographical Association. And, even if it took decades for cooperation in this field to be permanent and effective, attempts at creating an international geographical association multiplied before the First World War. Hunter’s map, which was sold to the general public and soon bought by the French Societé de Géographie, is an illustration of the growth of international science and inter-imperial circulation of knowledge.39

“Native” information and local cartographies: ambivalent topographies

  • 40 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 357.
  • 41 Ibid., p. 357.
  • 42 John Gordon Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, Calcutta, Government o (...)

16Much of the information used by Hunter to create his map of Arabia actually came from local sources. Surprisingly, he took little interest in the works of legendary explorers such as Richard Burton. Hunter paid limited attention to the unprofessional surveys of the heroic age of Arabian exploration.40 By contrast, he believed local sources to be extremely useful to his compilation. He referred, for instance, to Al-Hamdani’s Sifat Jazirat al-‘Arab, an ancient book on the geography of Arabia dating back to the tenth century. Lorimer had told Hunter how he had seen a “venerable Arab” in the streets of Bagdad use Al-Hamdani’s work “the same way as a modern tourist would the Baedeker”.41 This convinced Hunter that the book could be useful to his cartographic enterprise. This revealing anecdote shows that Anglo-Indian agents took great interest in local uses. Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia openly drew on this category of sources. Local informants and officials such as the then Bagdad consulate’s dragoman, Yacoub Thaddeus, or a Bagdad-based broker named Thomas Khalil, provided Lorimer with a wealth of data on Mesopotamia in the early twentieth century.42

  • 43 Hunter, “Reminiscences”.
  • 44 Turkish Ministry of War, Kharitat uruq al Hajjaj, 1888, scale 1:100,000.
  • 45 Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps, New York, Guilford Press, 2010.

17Mesopotamia was not the only terrain where information drawn from non-British actors was crucial to Hunter’s compilation. He used Turkish maps as well, for areas of the Peninsula where other sources greatly lacked in accuracy. He mentioned a Hijaz Railway map in his 1919 article.43 He probably used a Turkish map of Mecca designed for Muslim pilgrimsin 1888. A copy of this document is kept at the Bodleian Library, which indicates that British authorities did not overlook Ottoman topographic surveys.44 Both sources are examples of the development of modernized Ottoman cartography which followed the reforms implemented from the mid-nineteenth century by the Sultans. The Ottoman administration first recruited European experts and set up a topographical department in 1880. Ottoman cartography progressively became autonomous. The Mecca and Hijaz maps are traces of the adoption and subversion of Western cartographical rhetoric by the so-called Easterners, which Denis Wood calls counter-mapping.45 The fact that Hunter relied on these documents is in itself proof of the complexity of the exchanges and circulations between East and West in the late nineteenth century. Europe’s intellectual and scientific dominance was not a unilateral and uncontested process.

  • 46 See Charles Edward Yate, Northern Afghanistan: Or, Letters from the Afghan Boundary Commission, Edi (...)
  • 47 Derek J. Waller, The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia, Lexington, KY, Univers (...)
  • 48 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Constitution of Knowledge in South Asia a (...)
  • 49 J. Theodore Bent, “Exploration of the Frankincense Country, Southern Arabia”, The Geographical Jour (...)
  • 50 J. Theodore Bent, Southern Arabia, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.
  • 51 Thomas G. Montgomerie, “On the Geographical Position of Yarkund, and Some Other Places in Central A (...)

18One last example shows how Hunter filled in the blanks of his map with the help of non-European actors. Most of his data on Hadramaut was collected by a Pundit named Imam Sharif who had a long field experience as a surveyor in the Afghan Boundary Commission (1884-1886).46 The Pundits were Indian assistants, most of the time Kashmiri, trained in specific schools by the Indian Survey.47 They did most of the fieldwork when the territories under survey proved too dangerous for Westerners.48 This was a costeffective alternative. Imam Sharif was employed by Theodore and Mabel Bent when they surveyed the region in 1894.49 In Hadramaut, the Senior Indian Surveyor left the main expedition with a small party to avoid detection. He surveyed the region under the cover of a tradesman from India, a rather unexceptional traveller in the area which enjoyed old trading connections with the subcontinent. The Bents therefore authored a book largely based on someone else’s observations.50 They nevertheless mentioned Imam Sharif’s on the Map of Arabia showing the routes of Mr. J. Theodore Bent (Fig. 2). This was far from uncommon. Most of what the Raj knew of its Frontier in the North was collected by this corporation of Indian agents. Roderick Murchison, who presided over the Royal Geographical Society in the 1860s, referred to them as “native Moonshees”.51

19While they opened unexplored areas to British cartography, local assistants and informants could sometimes manipulate and hide sensitive information. In 1908, Hunter himself asked an Indian surveyor named Abdur Rahim, to go to the Holy (and forbidden) City of Mecca. He gave the Pundit a miniature version of his map of Arabia, then provided him with a small sextant and a detailed series of topographical questions to solve. Abdur Rahim was unable to keep his mission secret. His fellow Indian surveyors, some of whom were devout Muslims, heard of Fraser Hunter’s scheme and informed the Turkish Consulate of the plan. Abdur Rahim was arrested, searched and his instruments confiscated. He managed somehow to keep the map, which was mistaken for a handkerchief by Turkish officials. Indian surveyors were thus able not to let sensitive information fall into British hands whenever they deemed necessary.

  • 52 Hunter, “Reminiscences,” p. 360.
  • 53 See the map of Mesopotamia by Collingwood in Bewsher, “On Part of Mesopotamia Contained between She (...)
  • 54 Charles Rathbone Low, History of the Indian Navy: 1613-1863, London, R. Bentley and Son, 1877, p. 4 (...)
  • 55 See for instance Claude R. Conder, Tent Work in Palestine. A Record of Discovery and Adventure, Lon (...)

20Such manipulations or omissions left few traces. British surveyors eschewed them in their accounts unless they provided a good anecdote or underlined their heroic achievements. Yet they were more than just peripheral to Western geographies of Arabia in the nineteenth century. Local inhabitants often understood the implications of surveys and could sometimes resist them. Hunter recalled how local tribesmen in Oman shot at Tandy while he was conducting his surveys on their lands.52 This was not an isolated incident. Years earlier, William B. Selby was confronted with similar difficulties in the marshes of Southern Mesopotamia.53 The local Madan Arabs were well aware of how topographical exploration could lead to foreign intrusion. A sheikh named Faasil apparently helped them: he let them live. He was murdered by his people because he had let the British agents reconnoitre “the fat of the land”.54 The Wahhabi of the Nejd were very careful not to allow any systematic European exploration of their land as well. On the other hand, some populations welcomed Western surveyors. Eastern Christians for instance, often facilitated their work.55 It was a way to place their territories on the map and enjoy protection. The same applies to British-protected Sheiks in the Trucial States of the Gulf: names and borders on a map established their legitimacy. Exploring and mapping Arabia was a multilateral process in which transactions and manipulations by locals shaped Western visions. Hunter’s map of Arabia testifies to this multilayered construction of the geography and topography of the Peninsula.

Figure 2: Map of Arabia showing the routes of Mr. J. Theodore Bent, scale 1 inch: 1 mile, in Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia, London, Smith and Elder, 1900.

  • 56 Gore, On the Projection for a Map.

21Was Hunter’s work as unreliable as the War Office seemed to think in the late 1900s? The cartographer’s tireless efforts to sort out the best sources from the mass of information he had to process were eventually acknowledged by the best experts of the region. St John Philby took a copy of Hunter’s map when he set off to meet with Ibn Sa’ud in 1917.56 Most of the coordinates he computed were actually quite accurate, at least for the Gulf, southeastern Arabia or the Red Sea coasts. Central Arabia partly remained a “white spot”. Ha’il, the Wahhabi capital was located with an error of more than 20 miles; Hunter’s trust in local knowledge was not misplaced. Yet, his map did not just unveil Arabia, it revealed the power relationships which presided over the expansion of Britain’s influence in the region. The Metropolitan outlook, for instance, could considerably differ from the views of other imperial centers, such as India and Egypt. The Raj in its turn did not always enjoy full control over its sub-imperial agents in the Gulf and in the rest of the Peninsula. All in all, this multilayered structure did not translate into an insuperable opposition between the metropole and the rest of the Empire. Everyone agreed to minimize intelligence input from local informants, and most agents in the field genuinely believed they were working for Britain’s best interests. However, the words they used did not always have the same meaning. Overarching imperial rhetorics did not reconcile the diversity of views that flourished within the heterogeneous components of British influence in the Middle East. Depending on where one would talk or write from, Arabia could be a Biblical land to be explored, one of the last unexplored terrains where one could become a hero, or a tangible strategic reality and even the key to the Middle East. Much like Hunter’s cartographic achievement, the British mental map of the region was a multiple-sourced construct, which involved India, Britain, Egypt, and a variety of actors who were working for a seemingly common purpose in an uncoordinated fashion. As a consequence pre-World War One cartography of the Orient was only panoramic and all-seeing on paper. The aggregate of heterogeneous sources of knowledge did not make up a system. The development of Britain’s imagined geography of Arabia therefore was a dialectical process in which local inhabitants and interests were active participants.

Bibliographie

Bibliography

Primary sources

Maps

Bent, J. Th., Map of Arabia Showing the Routes of Mr. J. Theodore Bent, scale 1 inch: 1 mile, in Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia, London, Smith and Elder, 1900.

Hunter, F. F., Map of Arabia and The Persian Gulf, Survey of India, 1908, scale 1 inch: 48 miles, 90 x 65 cm.

Turkish Ministry of War, Kharitat uruq al Hajjaj, 1888, scale 1:100,000.

Archives

Royal Geographical Society, The Capt. William H. I. Shakespear Collection, 1914 notebook, file 91/4.

India Office Records (British Library), IOR/L/PS/10/135 and IOR: L/PS/10/259: correspondence about Hunter, 1910.

Published primary sources

“Asie Turque”, Annales de Géographie, no. 20, 1911, pp. 194-9.

Abbott, K. E., “Geographical Notes, Taken During a Journey in Persia in 1849 and 1850”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 25, 1855, pp. 1-78.

Bent, J. Th., Southern Arabia, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.

Bent, J. Th., “Exploration of the Frankincense Country, Southern Arabia”, The Geographical Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 1895, pp. 109-33.

Bewsher, J. B. “On Part of Mesopotamia Contained between Sheriat-El-Beytha, on the Tigris, and Tel Ibrahim”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 37, 1867, pp. 160-82.

Burton, R. F., Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855.

Bury, G. W., The Land of Uz, London, Macmillan, 1911.

Conder, C. R., Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure, London, R. Bentley & Son, 1878.

Stock, R., Marama; a Tale of the South Pacific, London, Hutchinson, 1913.

Gore, G. C., On the Projection for a Map of India and Adjacent Countries on the Scale of 1:1,000,000, Dehra Dun, Printed at the Office of the Trigonometrical Branch, Survey of India, 1900.

Huber, C., Journal d’un voyage en Arabie (1883-1884), Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1891.

Hunter, F. F., Notes on the Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, with a General Index of Place Names on the Map, Calcutta, Superintendent Govt. Printing, 1910.

Hunter, F. F., “Reminiscences of the Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf”, The Geographical Journal, vol. 54, no. 6, 1919, pp. 355-63.

India Office, The India List and India Office List, London, Harrison, 1905.

Low, C. R., History of the Indian Navy: 1613-1863, London, R. Bentley and Son, 1877.

Miles, S. B., “Journey from Gwadur to Karachi”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 44, 1874, pp. 163-82.

Miles, S. B., “On the Border of the Great Desert: A Journey in Oman (Continued)”, The Geographical Journal, vol. 36, no. 4, 1910, pp. 405-25.

Miles, S. B., “On the Route between Sohár and El-Bereymí in Omán, with a Note on the Zatt, or Gypsies in Arabia”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1877, pp. 41-60.

Montgomerie, Th. G., “On the Geographical Position of Yarkund, and Some Other Places in Central Asia”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 36, 1866.

Musil, A., The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, New York, American Geographical Society, 1928.

Musil, A., “Karte Von Arabia Petraea”, Wien, Alfred Hölder, 1906.

Yate, C. E., Northern Afghanistan: Or, Letters from the Afghan Boundary Commission, Edinburgh & London, W. Blackwood & Sons, 1888.

Secondary sources

Adelson, R., London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994.

Arboit, G., “Un Jésuite au service de la France du Second Empire: les missions du Père Cohen dans le désert de Syrie et d’Arabie”, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, vol. 96, no. 1-2, 2010, pp. 88-100.

British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the Annual Meeting, no. 63, London, Murray, 1894, p. 562.

Crawford E., T. Shinn and S. Sörlin (eds.), Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice, Dordrecht, Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.

Feigl, E., Musil Von Arabien: Vorkämpher Der Islamischen Welt, Wien, Amalthea, 1985.

Gavin, R. J., Aden under British Rule, 1839-1967, London, Hurst, 1975.

Hajari, H., “Oman through British Eyes British Travel Writing on Oman from 1800 to 1970”, unpublished PhD. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2003.

Harley, J. B., “Deconstructing the Map”, Cartographica, vol. 26, no. 2, 1989.

Harley, J. B., The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Lorimer, J. G., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, Calcutta: Government of India, 1915.

Macro, E., “George Wyman Bury South Arabian Pioneer”, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, no. 13, 1983, pp. 93-100.

Moscrop, J. J., Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land, London, Leicester University Press, 1999.

Murchison, R. I., “Address to the Royal Geographical Society”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 36, 1866, pp. cxviii-cxcvii.

Newton, D., Kipling’s Canadian: Colonel Fraser Hunter, Mpp, Maverick Soldier-Surveyor in “the Great Game”, Victoria, BC, Trafford, 2009.

Onley, J., “The Raj Reconsidered: British India’s Informal Empire and Spheres of Influence in Asia and Africa”, Asian Affairs, vol. 40, no. 1, 2009, pp. 44-62.

Raj, K., Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Constitution of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Said, E. W., Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.

Satia, P., Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Waller, D. J., The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia, Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Wood, D., Rethinking the Power of Maps, New York, Guilford Press, 2010.

Wright, D., The English Amongst the Persians: Imperial Lives in Nineteenth-Century Iran, London, I. B. Tauris, 2001.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: F. Fraser Hunter., Map of Arabia and The Persian Gulf, Survey of India, 1908, scale: 1 inch/48 miles, 90 x 65 cm, BNF, GE BB-137

Figure 2: Map of Arabia Showing the Routes of Mr. J. Theodore Bent, scale 1 inch: 1 mile, in Theodore et Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (London, Smith and Elder, 1900).

Notes

1 India Office, The India List and India Office List, London, Harrison, 1905, p. 31. On Fraser Hunter, see David Newton, Kipling’s Canadian: Colonel Fraser Hunter, Mpp, Maverick Soldier-Surveyor in “the Great Game”, Victoria, BC, Trafford, 2009.

2 The Survey of India was the mapping agency of the British government in India.

3 The Indian Political Service was a department of the British government in India. Its officers were in charge of frontier areas. They were instrumental to the extension of the Raj’s indirect rule outside India.

4 Frederick Fraser Hunter, “Reminiscences of the Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf”, The Geographical Journal, vol. 54, no. 6, 1919, p. 356.

5 Ibid.

6 John Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 53.

7 John Brian Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”, Cartographica, vol. 26, no. 2, 1989.

8 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.

9 See John J. Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land, London, Leicester University Press, 1999.

10 Royal Geographical Society, The Capt. William H. I. Shakespear Collection, 1914 notebook, file 91/4.

11 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 361.

12 See Hunter, “Reminiscences”.

13 Robert J. Gavin, Aden under British Rule, 1839-1967, London, Hurst, 1975, pp. 36-8.

14 Part of Bury’s papers are kept in the British Library, see IOR/L/PS/10/135. Bury published a book based on his surveys a few years after Hunter published his first version of the map, see George Wyman Bury, The Land of Uz, London, Macmillan, 1911.

15 Hunter mentioned Bury’s work on several occasions. See Newton, Kipling’s Canadian.

16 Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855.

17 Keith Edward Abbott, “Geographical Notes, Taken During a Journey in Persia in 1849 and 1850”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 25, 1855.

18 Denis Wright, The English Amongst the Persians: Imperial Lives in Nineteenth-Century Iran, London, I. B. Tauris, 2001, p. 80.

19 Eric Macro, “George Wyman Bury South Arabian Pioneer”, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, no. 13, 1983. One of the first occurrences of the phrase “gone native” is to be found in Ralph Stock, Marama; a Tale of the South Pacific, London, Hutchinson, 1913, p. 60.

20 James Onley, “The Raj Reconsidered: British India’s Informal Empire and Spheres of Influence in Asia and Africa”, Asian Affairs, vol. 40, no. 1, 2009.

21 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 360.

22 Samuel B. Miles, “On the Route between Sohár and El-Bereymí in Omán, with a Note on the Zatt, or Gypsies in Arabia”, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1877.

23 Samuel B. Miles, “On the Border of the Great Desert: A Journey in Oman (Continued)”, The Geographical Journal, vol. 36, no. 4, 1910, p. 410.

24 Samuel B. Miles, “Journey from Gwadur to Karachi”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 44, 1874, p. 173.

25 Hilal Hajari, “Oman through British Eyes British Travel Writing on Oman from 1800 to 1970”, unpublished PhD. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2003.

26 Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 27.

27 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 356.

28 Frederick Fraser Hunter, Notes on the Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, with a General Index of Place Names on the Map, Calcutta, Superintendent Govt. Printing, 1910.

29 See George C. Gore, On the Projection for a Map of India and Adjacent Countries on the Scale of 1:1,000,000, Dehra Dun, Printed at the Office of the Trigonometrical Branch, Survey of India, 1900.

30 See India Office Records (British Library), IOR: L/PS/10/259: correspondence about Hunter, 1910.

31 Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994.

32 Hunter, Notes, pp. 1-3.

33 Charles Huber, Journal d’un voyage en Arabie (1883-1884), Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1891. Fraser Hunter refers to this work in his Notes, p. 1.

34 Gérald Arboit, “Un Jésuite au service de la France du Second Empire: les missions du Père Cohen dans le désert de Syrie et d’Arabie”, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, vol. 96, no. 1-2, 2010.

35 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 361. Alois Musil, “Karte Von Arabia Petraea”, Wien, Alfred Hölder, 1906, scale 1: 300,000, 39 x 36 inches. Hunter specifically mentions Musil’s work in his 1919 article.

36 Alois Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, New York, American Geographical Society, 1928.

37 See Erich Feigl, Musil Von Arabien: Vorkämpher Der Islamischen Welt, Wien, Amalthea, 1985.

38 Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin, Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice, Dordrecht & Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993, p. 1.

39 See “Asie Turque”, Annales de Géographie, no. 20, 1911, p. 198.

40 Hunter, “Reminiscences”, p. 357.

41 Ibid., p. 357.

42 John Gordon Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, Calcutta, Government of India, 1915.

43 Hunter, “Reminiscences”.

44 Turkish Ministry of War, Kharitat uruq al Hajjaj, 1888, scale 1:100,000.

45 Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps, New York, Guilford Press, 2010.

46 See Charles Edward Yate, Northern Afghanistan: Or, Letters from the Afghan Boundary Commission, Edinburgh & London, W. Blackwood & Sons, 1888, p. 115 and British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report of the annual meeting, no. 63, London, Murray, 1894, p. 562.

47 Derek J. Waller, The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia, Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

48 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Constitution of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

49 J. Theodore Bent, “Exploration of the Frankincense Country, Southern Arabia”, The Geographical Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 1895.

50 J. Theodore Bent, Southern Arabia, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.

51 Thomas G. Montgomerie, “On the Geographical Position of Yarkund, and Some Other Places in Central Asia”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, no. 36, 1866, p. 161.

52 Hunter, “Reminiscences,” p. 360.

53 See the map of Mesopotamia by Collingwood in Bewsher, “On Part of Mesopotamia Contained between Sheriat-El-Beytha, on the Tigris, and Tel Ibrahim”.

54 Charles Rathbone Low, History of the Indian Navy: 1613-1863, London, R. Bentley and Son, 1877, p. 416.

55 See for instance Claude R. Conder, Tent Work in Palestine. A Record of Discovery and Adventure, London, R. Bentley and Son, 1878.

56 Gore, On the Projection for a Map.

Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1: F. Fraser Hunter, Map of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, Survey of India, 1908, scale 1 inch/48 miles, 90 x 65 cm, BNF, GE BB-137. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6026/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,1M
Légende Figure 2: Map of Arabia showing the routes of Mr. J. Theodore Bent, scale 1 inch: 1 mile, in Theodore and Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia, London, Smith and Elder, 1900.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6026/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,2M

Auteur

Lecturer in British studies at Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense University. His main research area is the British Empire in the nineteenth century with a focus on its visualizations. His first book entitled Dislocating the Orient will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. The volume sets out to explore the genealogy of the Middle East as a geographical concept. He has also published articles on British and French early photography in the East in the Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle and Études Photographiques. He is currently working on the imagery of colonial violence before the First World War.

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