Empire as Spectacle: Harmsworth’s Atlas of the World and Pictorial Gazetteer with an Atlas of the Great War

Abstract

Harmsworth’s Atlas of the World and Pictorial Gazetteer with an Atlas of the Great War, published c.1920, is an extravagant and extremely detailed work of geography and cartography. The world is laid before its readership as a spectacle involving four hundred and eighty-five coloured maps, and over three and a half thousand photographs of peoples and places. It celebrates the British Empire, but also explores the significant penetration of competitor powers world-wide. The atlas is examined from a world-systems perspective, which recognizes inter-regional and transnational division of the world into core, periphery and semi-periphery. The information contained in the atlas is consistent with the understanding needed for restructuring of the British economy following the end of the ‘Edwardian Boom’ and the devastation of the ‘Great War’, prior to which the two main lead regions in contention with Great Britain were Germany and the USA. Germany’s pre-war ‘peaceful penetration’ of areas of British interest are dissected forensically in the section on the ‘Great War’. The world-wide development of communications infrastructure, as well as industries, is covered in great detail in the atlas; which could be described as a ‘road map’ for reassertion of British hegemony. The paper draws cultural geography to explore the way in which the atlas interpreted the world for its readership. It examines the visual and textual means by which an ‘imperial gaze’ is constructed as a set of representations that reinforce the assumed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon world. Distant places and peoples are subordinated to this gaze, and their geographies constructed according to a grand imperial vision.