colonial maps
Conquerors' territorial charts
Colonial maps are cartographic documents produced during or depicting periods of colonial rule, showing territories as understood or claimed by colonizing powers.
They often reflect imperial perspectives—boundaries drawn by distant capitals, indigenous lands renamed, resources catalogued for extraction.
Historians study them both as navigation tools and as artifacts of how empires imagined and imposed control over colonized regions.
- EurocentrismBias toward Western perspectives
- white man's burdenImperialist ideology disguising exploitation
- surveyingMeasuring and charting terrain
- trade routesPaths for exchanging goods
- explorationTraveling through unknown regions
spice trade · colonization · land claims · imperialism · empire building · indigenous lands · ethnocentrism · resource extraction · dispossession · atlas · cartouches · map projection · exoticism · territorial disputes · visual propaganda · forced migration · engraving · topography