Green with Greed: Reading Colonial Psychosis in Historical Maps (Part One)
There's a particular feeling that washes over me when I encounter certain historical maps during research. It's visceral, immediate, and deeply unsettling. The colors feel sickly, the typography aggressive, the data selection deliberately violent. These maps carry what I can only describe as the energy of gangrene: that greenish, putrid quality of something rotting from within while maintaining an outward appearance of vitality.
Close-up of 1826 “Map of United States” by Anthony Finley
The work of understanding liberation cartography requires confronting these diseased documents. They provide essential contrast, revealing the extractive worldview that counter-cartography seeks to dismantle. When you understand how deeply programmed our spatial imagination has become, you begin to see why reclaiming authentic relationship with place matters beyond words.
Anthony Finley's Infected Vision
Anthony Finley (1784-1836) produced some of the most widely circulated American atlases of the early 19th century. His maps reached classrooms and libraries across the expanding United States, training entire generations to see the world through a particular lens. What strikes me about Finley's cartographic legacy isn't his technical skill but the psychological atmosphere his maps generate.
Look at his 1826 "Map of the United States." The territorial boundaries pulse with aggressive certainty, each state outlined in colors that feel almost medical in their artificiality. There's something about the way he renders Indigenous territories that makes my stomach turn. Areas labeled "Indian Territory" appear as empty spaces waiting to be filled, their indigenous names either absent or relegated to small, apologetic text. The rivers and mountain ranges that served as sacred geography for countless nations become merely obstacles to be overcome or resources to be extracted.
The color palette itself tells a story. Those sickly greens and yellows, the harsh pinks and blues that seem to compete rather than harmonize. These aren't colors drawn from natural observation but from the colonial imagination's need to organize, categorize, and ultimately possess. When I compare Finley's maps to traditional indigenous spatial representations, the difference in energetic quality becomes undeniable.
The "Chart of the Inhabited World": Colonial Categories as Violence
Perhaps nothing reveals the extractive mindset more clearly than educational maps designed for children. William Woodbridge and Emma Willard's 1821 "Chart of the Inhabited World" claims to exhibit "the prevailing Religion, form of Government, degree of Civilization & Population of each Country." The audacity of this title alone reveals the colonial psyche's fundamental assumption: that European categories could contain and evaluate all human societies.
“Chart of the Inhabited World”, 1821 by William C. Woodbridge and Emma Willard
How exactly did these cartographers determine "degree of civilization" with such confident precision? The map reduces the complex societies of Patagonia to a single label: "Indians." Thousands of distinct cultures, languages, and governance systems collapsed into one dismissive category. The same violent reduction appears across continents, where sophisticated kingdoms, confederations, and nations become simply "uncivilized" areas marked in darker, more ominous colors.
The psychological framework embedded in this educational tool shaped how American children understood their place in the world. They learned to see themselves as part of the "civilized" world, surrounded by territories and peoples requiring either salvation or subjugation. The map doesn't simply show geography; it programs a worldview based on hierarchy, extraction, and cultural supremacy.
"World At One View": The Universe Reorganized Around European Supremacy
The 1854 "World At One View" by Bridgman & Fanning Ensign represents colonial cartography at its most psychologically revealing. This massive archival document places European figures literally at the center of human understanding, surrounded by what the creators present as the four "types" of humanity: Caucasian, Mongol, African, and Malay.
1854 “World at One View” by Bridgman & Fanning Ensign
The spatial arrangement isn't accidental. Notice how the pale European figures occupy the top corner positions while darker-skinned peoples are relegated to the lower-corner sections. The single white male centered among varying degrees of other races creates a visual hierarchy that reinforces colonial assumptions about human worth and capability.
What strikes me as discreetly disgusting is how this map appropriates knowledge systems while erasing their origins. The mariner's compass displayed prominently beneath the words “Principal Varieties of the Human Race”, derives from ancient Chinese innovation, yet Chinese peoples are relegated to secondary status in the racial hierarchy. This pattern of extraction and re-contextualization runs throughout colonial cartography: taking sophisticated technologies and knowledge systems while diminishing the cultures that created them.
The Violence of Aesthetic Choices
These maps assault the senses in ways that extend beyond their ideological content. The color choices feel deliberately harsh, creating visual environments that mirror the extractive relationships they represent. Where traditional indigenous mapping often uses earth tones and organic patterns that reflect natural relationships, colonial cartography employs artificial colors that seem to dominate rather than describe landscape.
[Left] Close-up of 1826 Finley Map of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Part of Michigan; [Right] Map of Bamun Kingdom in Cameroon made in 1920 on the orders of King Njoya
The typography screams rather than speaks. Font choices emphasize dominance over clarity, with European place names rendered in bold capitals while indigenous names appear in smaller, more tentative script, when they appear at all. Even the decorative elements feel predatory. The elaborate cartouches and flourishes don't celebrate beauty but display wealth and power, like peacock feathers on a bird of prey.
This aesthetic violence serves colonial purposes by training viewers to associate European spatial organization with sophistication while perceiving other approaches as primitive or chaotic. The maps teach aesthetic preferences that reinforce political relationships, making colonial domination appear not just practical but beautiful.
Why This Recognition Matters
Finding these maps that completely repulse me has become an essential part of my counter-cartographic practice. They provide crucial insight into the thought realm of extractivism, revealing how spatial imagination supports systems of exploitation. When you can feel the psychological atmosphere these documents generate, you begin to understand how actutely our relationship with place has been colonized.
This isn't simply academic analysis but embodied recognition. The visceral response these maps generates offers information that purely intellectual critique might miss. Our bodies know when spatial representations carry violence, even when our trained minds have learned to overlook it.
The contrast these diseased documents provide helps me recognize maps that feel clean, exploratory, and genuinely curious about the places they represent. Some cartographers, even within colonial contexts, maintained enough intellectual honesty to create documents that describe rather than dominate. Learning to distinguish between these energetic qualities develops crucial discernment for anyone seeking authentic relationships with place and land.
Reading the Psychological Landscape
What fascinates me about maps like Finley's is how they reveal the internal landscape of their creators. The aggressive territorial boundaries, the reductive categories, the visual hierarchy that places European perspective at the center of everything… these choices expose a profound disconnection from the living world and from authentic relationship with other human beings.
The colonial cartographic imagination operates from fundamental assumptions about separation, hierarchy, and possession that indigenous spatial understanding typically doesn't share. Where traditional mapping often emphasizes relationship, flow, and seasonal change, colonial maps freeze territory into static possessions marked by hard boundaries.
This psychological framework didn't emerge in a vacuum. It developed alongside economic systems that required treating land as commodity and people as either labor or obstacles. The maps both reflect and reinforce these relationships, creating visual representations that make extraction appear natural and inevitable.
Understanding this psychological dimension helps explain why counter-cartographic work matters. These maps didn't simply document territory; they programmed ways of seeing that continue shaping how we relate to place today. Breaking free from these inherited spatial patterns requires recognizing their presence and choosing different ways of imagining our relationship with the living world.
Next week: Part Two of this series will explore how recognizing colonial cartographic violence opens pathways toward healing our relationship with place, examining specific techniques for developing discernment and practical approaches to counter-cartographic practice.
Explore alternative cartographic visions: The Tarru Nadi Collection offers historical maps that challenge colonial spatial narratives through careful curation and decolonial perspective.
