Nineteenth-century scientific mapping functioned as political appropriation serving occupying militaries

Evidence

For Jomard, himself an experienced traveler to Egypt and the Sudan, that was where the value of Selim Qapudan’s trip lay. Certainly, within the discourse of western Europe in the early to mid–nineteenth century, the gathering of geographical information was a labor performed in the service of understanding “the world and its contents.” And the techniques of geographical study enhanced the power of the explorer-observer on important levels: “To map hitherto ‘unknown’ regions (unknown, that is, to the European) using modern techniques in triangulation and geodesy was both a scientific activity dependent on trained personnel and state-of-the-art equipment and also a political act of appropriation which had obvious strategic utility to occupying military forces.” Muhammad Alï was keenly aware of this discourse and, in his turn, tried to channel this force of geographical expertise by hiring noted European experts for Selim Qapudan’s expedition, one of whom,Thibaut, had earlier scouted the Sudan for giraffes for the Zoological Society of London. And so, on a journey reminiscent of the French expedition to Egypt under Napoleon, Muhammad Alï sent a group of scientists and engineers into the Sudan accompanied by military might. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial geography literature on cartography as a tool of empire (Harley, Edney’s ‘Mapping an Empire’).
• QUESTION: Does the reader’s broader coloniality framework already distinguish French scientific exploration in Egypt from Muhammad Ali’s use of the same techniques?