Unmapping Africa: Enlightenment Geography and the Making of Blank Spaces
In the eighteenth century, European maps of Africa became increasingly empty. Rivers and mountains, kingdoms and cities that had been mapped for centuries, suddenly disappeared and were replaced by blank spaces. The blanks continued to characterise maps of the continent throughout the nineteenth century, a period of intensified exploration, expansion, evangelisation, and violence in the course of European empire building. Whereas earlier studies have investigated the role of blank spaces in creating and sustaining the perception of Africa as an unknown and unclaimed continent, the blanks themselves have long been understood as the unintended bi-product of improved scientific standards. While this explanation originates with the geographers themselves, it does not hold in the face of the empirical evidence. Through detailed examination of the maps and writings, drafts, sketches, notes and letters of Jean-Baptiste d'Anville and other leading geographers of the French Enlightenment, I reconstruct the epistemological concerns and practical priorities that motivated and informed European geographers as they transformed Africa into a largely unwritten sheet. In thus shifting the focus from critically reading the finished maps, to critically examining their production histories, I explore the ways in which not only the employment of colonial maps—but also their making—was fundamentally shaped by contemporary power relations.
Final report
AIMS AND ACTIVITIES
The project has investigated the making of Africa’s blank spaces, that is, the large white regions covering much of the continent’s interior on European maps produced before the Scramble. While earlier scholarship has stressed how the largely empty maps helped shape European ideas of Africa’s interior as a no-man’s-land, awaiting exploration and conquest, “Unmapping Africa” has instead explored the eighteenth-century removal of previously mapped information, asking why data long included on maps was deleted in the first place. Because early-modern Europeans had limited first-hand experience of Africa’s interior, they depended heavily on non-European reports to map it. Yet, during the eighteenth century, geographers increasingly suppressed such information, even when they had nothing better to place in its stead.
Whereas this apparent shift from knowledge to ignorance has long been rationalised as the unintended by-product of improved scientific standards, “Unmapping Africa” has demonstrated that this explanation does not hold in the face of the empirical evidence. Through detailed study of maps, drafts, notes, and writings of Jean-Baptiste d’Anville and other geographers in the European Enlightenment, the project has reconstructed the epistemological and practical priorities that guided them as they transformed Africa’s interior into an unwritten sheet. By shifting the attention from the finished maps to their production histories, the project has demonstrated how not only the finished maps but also their production histories reflect contemporary hierarchies.
Running from 2022 to 2025, the project involved archival research in Sweden and abroad, notably in Paris, where I was hosted by the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CAK) and the Institut suédois. Sustained contacts with colleagues abroad helped enable an ambitious workshop programme. The first project workshop, “Unmapping Africa / Faire et défaire la carte d’Afrique”, was co-organised by Catherine Hofmann (BnF), Antonella Romano (EHESS/CAK), and myself, and held at the BnF on 26 June 2024. Scheduling the event in Paris the week before the International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC) in Lyon, enabled us to gather world-leading experts in one room, without paying for additional air travels.
A second workshop, “Trust and Distrust in the Un/Mapping of Africa”, was hosted by the Gotha Centre for Transcultural Studies in March 2025. Organised by Dominic Keyßner (Erfurt), Iris Schröder (Erfurt), and myself, it ran for three days and gathered fourteen participants, including several Ethiopian historians affiliated with the centre. A selection of the papers from Paris and Gotha are currently being edited for publication (below).
A third and final workshop on exploration and extraction was organised in Uppsala by Niels Josva Balling (Aarhus), Hanna Hodacs (Uppsala) and myself, while collaboration with Uppsala’s Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences helped advance the project’s methodological work. Participation at key conferences, informal exchanges, sustained correspondence, and numerous online meetings helped make the investigation relevant to a global network of scholars spanning every continent except Antarctica.
RESULTS
The project’s most important contribution is the development of “unmapping” as an analytical framework for studying the suppression of previously mapped data. In contrast to more established approaches that emphasise representation and semantics – notably Harley’s notion of cartographic “silences”, or indeed the notion of “blank spaces” – “unmapping” highlights the production of ignorance, or the processes whereby existing geographical data is cast into doubt, downgraded, or removed. The framework has already shaped two workshops and a collective volume in progress, meaning its analytical utility has outgrown the current project.
A second major result is the decisive challenge to established historiography. In published and unpublished articles, I have falsified the persistent claim that Africa’s blank spaces emerged as a result of improved scientific standards. I have shown, moreover, that such explanations reproduce eighteenth-century geographers’ own narratives of reform. Both the assumption that poor data was discarded while good data was retained, as well as the accusation that geographers relied only on European sources, are contradicted by the empirical evidence.
Instead, the blanking of Africa’s interior reflects personal biographies, new aesthetic preferences, and, above all, a profound renegotiation of trust. In the course of the eighteenth century, there appeared a new convention for the representation of Africa. This affected regions differently, reinforcing a division between North and South, between Arabic/Islamic and Black Africa: European geographers generally trusted reports on the northern interior but increasingly distrusted information about the south. Whether this divide reflects prejudice against Black Africans, against oral culture, or both, remains an open question.
DISSEMINATION
The project’s most important publication to date is a research article, “A New New World: Unmapping Africa in the Age of Reason”, published in the Journal for the History of Knowledge in a thematic issue on the cartographic representation of uncertainty. The article challenges established interpretations of Africa’s blank spaces and argues that the removal of previously mapped data on European maps effectively helped reinvent Africa as a new world territory. At the editors’ request, I also contributed a blog post to the journal’s website, narrating the research process.
A more important publication is currently in the making, as a special issue on the project theme has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Historical Geography. “Un/Mapping Africa: Rethinking the History of Africa’s Blank Spaces” is edited by Catherine Hofmann, Iris Schröder, and myself, and will bring together some ten papers presented in Paris and Gotha. My own contribution, “The French Ptolemy, the English d’Anville: The Nile, the Niger, and the Rehabilitation of Greek and Arab Geography” is near completion, and will be submitted for review in the coming month. The volume will also include a co-authored methodological essay, “The Unmapping of Africa as a Historical Problem”, currently in advanced manuscript form. Another research article, “Moving Rivers: Applying Digital Methods to Challenge Established Wisdom in the History of Cartography”, co-written with Yunyun Yang (Uppsala), will be submitted for review in spring 2026.
The project and its results have been presented at academic seminars, workshops and conferences in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. Highlights include a plenary lecture at the 30th International Conference on the History of Cartography, an invited talk in the Oxford Seminars in Cartography, and a “match” or twin lecture with Toby Yuen-Gen Liang (Academia Sinica) at the Max-Planck-Institut/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
Non-academic dissemination has been relatively extensive. My collaboration with Sweden’s National Museums of World Cultures has resulted in an animated film, which is available in a Swedish (“Afrikas vita fläckar”) as well as an English version (“Unmapping Africa”). The film will feature permanently in exhibitions in Stockholm and Gothenburg, and has also been made available online by Uppsala University. Colleagues from across Europe, Asia, and the two Americas tell me they are using it or plan to use it in teaching.
The project has also received substantial media attention. Notable examples include a feature in Swedish Radio’s Vetenskapsradion Historia, a lavishly illustrated interview in the Norwegian journal Arr, and several appearances in August 2025 explaining the historical background to the African Union’s endorsement of the “Correct the Map” campaign. These included segments in TV4 Efter fem, SR Dagens Eko, and SvD Junior, thus enabling outreach to diverse audiences, including children.
The project has investigated the making of Africa’s blank spaces, that is, the large white regions covering much of the continent’s interior on European maps produced before the Scramble. While earlier scholarship has stressed how the largely empty maps helped shape European ideas of Africa’s interior as a no-man’s-land, awaiting exploration and conquest, “Unmapping Africa” has instead explored the eighteenth-century removal of previously mapped information, asking why data long included on maps was deleted in the first place. Because early-modern Europeans had limited first-hand experience of Africa’s interior, they depended heavily on non-European reports to map it. Yet, during the eighteenth century, geographers increasingly suppressed such information, even when they had nothing better to place in its stead.
Whereas this apparent shift from knowledge to ignorance has long been rationalised as the unintended by-product of improved scientific standards, “Unmapping Africa” has demonstrated that this explanation does not hold in the face of the empirical evidence. Through detailed study of maps, drafts, notes, and writings of Jean-Baptiste d’Anville and other geographers in the European Enlightenment, the project has reconstructed the epistemological and practical priorities that guided them as they transformed Africa’s interior into an unwritten sheet. By shifting the attention from the finished maps to their production histories, the project has demonstrated how not only the finished maps but also their production histories reflect contemporary hierarchies.
Running from 2022 to 2025, the project involved archival research in Sweden and abroad, notably in Paris, where I was hosted by the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (CAK) and the Institut suédois. Sustained contacts with colleagues abroad helped enable an ambitious workshop programme. The first project workshop, “Unmapping Africa / Faire et défaire la carte d’Afrique”, was co-organised by Catherine Hofmann (BnF), Antonella Romano (EHESS/CAK), and myself, and held at the BnF on 26 June 2024. Scheduling the event in Paris the week before the International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC) in Lyon, enabled us to gather world-leading experts in one room, without paying for additional air travels.
A second workshop, “Trust and Distrust in the Un/Mapping of Africa”, was hosted by the Gotha Centre for Transcultural Studies in March 2025. Organised by Dominic Keyßner (Erfurt), Iris Schröder (Erfurt), and myself, it ran for three days and gathered fourteen participants, including several Ethiopian historians affiliated with the centre. A selection of the papers from Paris and Gotha are currently being edited for publication (below).
A third and final workshop on exploration and extraction was organised in Uppsala by Niels Josva Balling (Aarhus), Hanna Hodacs (Uppsala) and myself, while collaboration with Uppsala’s Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences helped advance the project’s methodological work. Participation at key conferences, informal exchanges, sustained correspondence, and numerous online meetings helped make the investigation relevant to a global network of scholars spanning every continent except Antarctica.
RESULTS
The project’s most important contribution is the development of “unmapping” as an analytical framework for studying the suppression of previously mapped data. In contrast to more established approaches that emphasise representation and semantics – notably Harley’s notion of cartographic “silences”, or indeed the notion of “blank spaces” – “unmapping” highlights the production of ignorance, or the processes whereby existing geographical data is cast into doubt, downgraded, or removed. The framework has already shaped two workshops and a collective volume in progress, meaning its analytical utility has outgrown the current project.
A second major result is the decisive challenge to established historiography. In published and unpublished articles, I have falsified the persistent claim that Africa’s blank spaces emerged as a result of improved scientific standards. I have shown, moreover, that such explanations reproduce eighteenth-century geographers’ own narratives of reform. Both the assumption that poor data was discarded while good data was retained, as well as the accusation that geographers relied only on European sources, are contradicted by the empirical evidence.
Instead, the blanking of Africa’s interior reflects personal biographies, new aesthetic preferences, and, above all, a profound renegotiation of trust. In the course of the eighteenth century, there appeared a new convention for the representation of Africa. This affected regions differently, reinforcing a division between North and South, between Arabic/Islamic and Black Africa: European geographers generally trusted reports on the northern interior but increasingly distrusted information about the south. Whether this divide reflects prejudice against Black Africans, against oral culture, or both, remains an open question.
DISSEMINATION
The project’s most important publication to date is a research article, “A New New World: Unmapping Africa in the Age of Reason”, published in the Journal for the History of Knowledge in a thematic issue on the cartographic representation of uncertainty. The article challenges established interpretations of Africa’s blank spaces and argues that the removal of previously mapped data on European maps effectively helped reinvent Africa as a new world territory. At the editors’ request, I also contributed a blog post to the journal’s website, narrating the research process.
A more important publication is currently in the making, as a special issue on the project theme has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Historical Geography. “Un/Mapping Africa: Rethinking the History of Africa’s Blank Spaces” is edited by Catherine Hofmann, Iris Schröder, and myself, and will bring together some ten papers presented in Paris and Gotha. My own contribution, “The French Ptolemy, the English d’Anville: The Nile, the Niger, and the Rehabilitation of Greek and Arab Geography” is near completion, and will be submitted for review in the coming month. The volume will also include a co-authored methodological essay, “The Unmapping of Africa as a Historical Problem”, currently in advanced manuscript form. Another research article, “Moving Rivers: Applying Digital Methods to Challenge Established Wisdom in the History of Cartography”, co-written with Yunyun Yang (Uppsala), will be submitted for review in spring 2026.
The project and its results have been presented at academic seminars, workshops and conferences in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. Highlights include a plenary lecture at the 30th International Conference on the History of Cartography, an invited talk in the Oxford Seminars in Cartography, and a “match” or twin lecture with Toby Yuen-Gen Liang (Academia Sinica) at the Max-Planck-Institut/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
Non-academic dissemination has been relatively extensive. My collaboration with Sweden’s National Museums of World Cultures has resulted in an animated film, which is available in a Swedish (“Afrikas vita fläckar”) as well as an English version (“Unmapping Africa”). The film will feature permanently in exhibitions in Stockholm and Gothenburg, and has also been made available online by Uppsala University. Colleagues from across Europe, Asia, and the two Americas tell me they are using it or plan to use it in teaching.
The project has also received substantial media attention. Notable examples include a feature in Swedish Radio’s Vetenskapsradion Historia, a lavishly illustrated interview in the Norwegian journal Arr, and several appearances in August 2025 explaining the historical background to the African Union’s endorsement of the “Correct the Map” campaign. These included segments in TV4 Efter fem, SR Dagens Eko, and SvD Junior, thus enabling outreach to diverse audiences, including children.