Connections and exchanges in European thematic cartography. The case of 19th century choropleth maps

Abstract

In the beginning of the 19th century, thematic cartography was enriched with subjects related to the human world. In particular, the enthusiasm for statistics put on the foreground several topics drawn from what we would call today “social sciences”: demography, political economics, and moral statistics. In this context, most of the methods of quantitative mapping were invented within a short period, between 1826 and 1850. This article deals with the first and the most popular among these methods, the shaded map, which is credited to the Frenchman Charles Dupin. We explore the circumstances in which it was imagined, and its modes of diffusion in European cartography. Dupin’s shaded map became quickly famous and was imitated by scholars in the field of vital and moral statistics, then of medicine and anthropology. We suggest that these thematic maps were not neutral illustrations, but were primarily conceived as arguments in scientific or ideological debates, and that their sign system played a major role in their persuasive effect.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.