SUMMARY:

The article tells the story of the creation of the Russian Corps of Topographical Engineers in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and its development into a major driving force behind imperial expansion in Central Asia over the next half century. The author contends that the surveys of hitherto unexplored territories by military topographers influenced the mental maps of imperial political and academic elites. These mental maps ascribed characteristics of physical reality to abstractions of topographic charts, for instance, treating contour lines of relief as “natural boundaries.” Political decisions were often based on such assumptions formed by reading topographic maps, driving the actual political border farther on to match “natural boundaries.” Most military topographers were recruited from the lower social strata, and their high productivity in surveying uncharted territories was their chance for being promoted and hence for advancing their social status. This combination of social and epistemological factors resulted in escalating the mechanism of imperial territorial expansion, both mental and political.