Elizabeth A. Sutton explores the fascinating but previously neglected history of corporate cartography during the Dutch Golden Age, from circa 1600 to 1650. She examines how maps were used as propaganda tools for the Dutch West India Company in order to encourage the commodification of land and an overall capitalist agenda.

We are living in the Golden Age of Data Visualization. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how we increasingly use data visualizations to make sense of the world. Business analysts fill their presentations with charts, journalists use infographics to engage their readers, we rely on the dials and gauges on our household appliances, and we use mapping apps on our smartphones to find our way. This book explains how and why this has happened. It details the evolution of information graphics, the kinds of graphics at the core of data visualization—maps, diagrams, charts, scientific and medical images—from prehistory to the present day. It explains how the cultural context, production and presentation technologies, and data availability have shaped the history of data visualization. It considers the perceptual and cognitive reasons why data visualization is so effective and explores the little-known world of tactile graphics—raised-line drawings used by people who are blind. The book also investigates the way visualization has shaped our modern world. The European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution relied on maps and technical and scientific drawings, and graphics influence how we think about abstract concepts like time and social connection. This book is written for data visualization researchers and professionals and anyone interested in data visualization and the way we use graphics to understand and think about the world.

Presents an overview of early modern Dutch history in global context, focusing on themes that resonate with current concerns.

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, they are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. These very characteristics, however, give maps their importance for understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world, and give historical maps, especially, the power to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature over time. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature across the Americas. Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history, and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas—including, for example, stories of indigenous cartography in Mexico, the allegorical presence of palm trees in maps of Argentina, the systemic mapping of US forests, and the scientific platting of Canada’s remote lands.

Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer are still household names, even though they died over three hundred years ago. In their lifetimes they witnessed the extraordinary consolidation of the newly independent Dutch Republic and its emergence as one of the richest nations on earth. As one contemporary wrote in 1673: the Dutch were 'the envy of some, the fear of others, and the wonder of all their neighbours'. During the Dutch Golden Age, the arts blossomed and the country became a haven of religious tolerance. However, despite being self-proclaimed champions of freedom, the Dutch conquered communities in America, Africa and Asia and were heavily involved in both slavery and the slave trade on three continents. This substantially revised second edition of the leading textbook on the Dutch Republic includes a new chapter exploring slavery and its legacy, as well as a new chapter on language and literature.

Each of the maps featured in this book was showcased in the exhibition “Canada before Confederation: Early Exploration and Mapping,” which took place in several locations, both in Canada and abroad, in Fall of 2017. The authors provide a scholarly study highlighting the importance and unique features of each of these jewels of cartographic history, with particular attention paid to how they demonstrate the development of Canadian identity at the same time that they reveal Indigenous knowledge of the lands now known as Canada.