Colonialism in the bosatlas

Abstract

For the purpose of making available scans of all maps in all 55 editions of the Bosatlas (1877–), the Dutch school atlas, on the Utrecht University Library website, all these maps are compared to each other, in order to reconstruct the editorial process. The purpose of this web service will be to allow Dutch school children to follow recent history in their own school atlas and to study, diachronically, the recent changes in particular areas. The first part of the project is to scan all 36 editions published up to World War II, and this period, 1877–1945, can be regarded as the heyday of colonialism. For this paper, the atlas is analysed from the point of view of depicting colonialism, trying to find changes in attitude in the language and the symbology used in the portrayal of colonial areas. For this analysis, the following aspects of the atlas have been researched: the sequence of the maps and the emphasis on specific areas, together constituting the atlas structure; the colouring of the atlas; naming (both the imposition of European names in the nineteenth century and the references to indigenous groups, their realms and settlements; symbolization (portrayal of settlements, boundaries) and finally the subjects mapped on thematic maps of colonial areas. The results of this analysis of the colonial portrayal will be part of the accompanying explanatory texts offered to the users of the website, together with texts on the reasons for the changes on the same map from one edition to the next.