Imperial map-coloring gave rise to the logo-map that anticolonial nationalisms adopted
Evidence
The second avatar was the map-as-logo. Its origins were reasonably innocent – the practice of the imperial states of colouring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye. In London’s imperial maps, British colonies were usually pink-red, French purple-blue, Dutch yellow-brown, and so on. Dyed this way, each colony appeared like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As this ‘jigsaw’ effect became normal, each ‘piece’ could be wholly detached from its geographic context. In its final form all explanatory glosses could be summarily removed: lines of longitude and latitude, place names, signs for rivers, seas, and mountains, neighbours. Pure sign, no longer compass to the world. In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 665
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels mechanical-reproduction argument from older chapters — reproducibility as precondition for the imagined community.
- SEED: Essay: how the jigsaw-puzzle map-color convention gave colonies a ready-made visual identity that nationalists then inherited and used as their flag-like emblem.