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From 1850 to 1859, a small group of European and American-born men undertook a survey of newly independent Colombia's interior on behalf of a weak central state. They sought to add to centralized knowledge of and to map the country's territory and its human and physical resources. Led by Italian-born military geographer Agustín Codazzi, who had conducted a similar survey in Venezuela, the mission included illustrators, a botanist, a chronicler, staff hired in Bogotá, and a series of local guides and support staff. The team produced extensive notes, illustrations, and maps, sketched on the road and revised upon return. Cartographic and ethnographic results were consulted extensively by the government and published immediately, and the archive became a cornerstone for subsequent Colombian scholarship and cartography, influencing regional divides and ideas of race and nation to the present day. On the centenary of this chorographic expedition, Colombia's national geographical institute was renamed the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi.Historian Nancy Appelbaum's meticulous study follows the expedition into and through a half dozen Colombian provinces. Via a close reading of textual and visual materials produced by the commission's members, she offers insight into the ups and downs of nineteenth-century fieldwork and brings to life the processes by which individual members viewed, collected, recorded, and summarized information gleaned as eyewitness observers and interrogators of informants from the northeast, the Pacific lowlands, the Eastern Plains, and the Amazon. With this material, Appelbaum shines in connecting the expedition's work to the broader questions of race and class in Colombia. She identifies key tropes in the reports that reflect both the ambitions and prejudices of the age, notably privileging the putatively progressive parts of society that were adopting European values and welcoming racial mixtures that ostensibly whitened society. In the Andes, expedition members found racial mixture and whitening, which they interpreted as signs of increasing uniformity that would create the basis of a modern country. In the African-origin population of the Chocó, however, Codazzi's advocacy of forced labor to bring progress, along with the opening of roads, reflected the continuation of colonial social and economic prejudice even as the state enfranchised men, regardless of economic status or race.In terms of providing a clear sense of the expedition's fieldwork, the peoples encountered and described, and the experiences of participants, Appelbaum's work is a welcome addition to the English-language history of nineteenth-century Colombia, contributing to the history of its science and providing a counterpoint to works that tend to focus on divisions seen principally from a single region. Her analysis of illustrations and some of the maps brings us closer to a fuller understanding of the expedition's findings and influence; the black-and-white reproductions of manuscript materials provide readers with a sense of the originals' style and a welcome chance to read along with the author. As Appelbaum notes in the volume, for those interested in studying the drawings and other Chorographic Commission materials for themselves, Colombia's Ministry of Culture has recently collaborated with the National Library to develop a Spanish-language website with full-color reproductions of 151 images from the commission (http://www.bibliotecanacional.gov.co/recursos_user/expv/comision_corografica/rutas-de-la-comision.html).Appelbaum sets up the Colombian story by discussing the genre-defining work of Alexander von Humboldt as an important innovative model. A welcome addition to the text would have been a more explicit situating of the Colombian case study in broader context for understanding territorial nation-state formation in former Spanish jurisdictions and the history of cartographic method and development more broadly. Eighteenth-century scientific and Jesuit expeditions and efforts by fellow nineteenth-century Spanish American republics to know and map national territory, interiors, and boundaries provide particularly rich opportunities to draw transnational connections.
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