Surveying

SURVEYING

SURVEYING. Surveying, initially the geometrical and legal description of local lands and county seats, gained importance throughout the early modern period as legal and economic arguments came to rely on accurate descriptions and, increasingly, on measurement and "plotting." By the late seventeenth century, surveying included the mapping of larger political units; by the eighteenth, military leaders and colonial governors, as well as landed individuals, employed surveyors and cartographers. Techniques and instruments developed throughout the period produced a coherent body of theory and practice used for imperial mapping in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

At the end of the fifteenth century, surveying consisted largely of written descriptions of fields and estates based on visual inspection of an area. Although landmarks and natural division points were more crucial for determining land ownership, these methods were often accompanied by some sort of measurement. In the first half of the sixteenth century, surveying was often restricted to "viewing" or chain-measuring, and the chain often symbolized the surveyors' profession. As the century progressed, and more standardized techniques of measurement were developed and surveying moved from linear and geometrical methods to those based on angular or trigonometric measurement, surveyors began to produce maps or "plots." Although such advanced mathematical methods were developed by the end of the century, chain-measuring continued to be used into the eighteenth century.

The introduction of triangulation methods, the plane table, and the theodolite, as well as rules of acceptable practice, transformed surveying into an exact art. Leonard Digges's Pantometria (1571), for example, introduced these techniques and instruments into England. Throughout the seventeenth century the new surveying instruments were refined, a number of surveying manuals were published, and surveyors were increasingly trained in mathematics and astronomical techniques. Surveying, unlike mapping on a larger scale or the later colonial and country surveys, such as the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (1824–1846), did not require longitude and latitude placement, and therefore did not use astronomical observations in order to achieve accuracy.

Part of the transformation in surveying that took place during the early modern period was related to the changing awareness on the part of landowners of the desirability of surveying and mapping their lands. As surveyors gradually convinced their patrons of the utility of scale maps, this cognitive shift led to a cartographic revolution. Carefully measured and drawn maps (as opposed to earlier sketch maps) began to be used by landowners as evidence in court cases, by generals planning their military strategies, and by governors interested in inventories and tax collecting. All of this was symptomatic of the developing map culture, driven in part by the increasing study of geography at schools and universities.

By the end of the early modern period, Europeans were surveying their own lands and the other parts of the world they were conquering. They believed that, through measurement and cartographic depiction, they could control the land and the people who lived there. Only the impressive developments of surveying instruments and techniques, and the conceptual acceptance of the scale map as an objective and controllable representation of the land, made that idea plausible.

See also Astronomy ; Cartography and Geography ; Colonialism ; Earth, Theories of the ; Engineering: Civil ; Exploration ; Landholding ; Mathematics ; Property ; Scientific Instruments ; Taxation .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett, James A. The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying. Oxford, 1987.

Kain, Robert J. P., and Elizabeth Baigent. The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping. Chicago, 1992.

Richeson, Allie Wilson. English Land Measuring to 1800: Instruments and Practices. Cambridge, Mass., 1966.

Lesley B. Cormack