In the eighteenth century, Britain relied on geographic knowledge to reform its American empire. The schemes of colonial development and control that these maps envisioned, Edelson argues, helped provoke the resistance that led to the American Revolution.

Lecture presented in collaboration with the Michigan Map Society.

S. Max Edelson is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His second book, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard, 2017) was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize in 2017 and received the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History by the North American Society for Oceanic History.