Following the “discovery” of the Americas, a global network for the flow of goods and information began to take shape, a network whose infrastructure continues to be visible today and whose development was part and parcel of the growth of Western science and technology. Francis Bacon, for instance, made an explicit connection between long-distance travel (that is, colonial expansion and the knowledge transfers it unleashed) and the growth of various scientific disciplines. Since the colonies could not be managed directly by the metropolis, they had to be objectified through scientific means and represented through emerging forms of records that could travel through time and space and thus conquer complexity. Principal among these new methods of management were two important technologies: maps (representations of the space to be colonized and managed) and surveys (mechanisms to extract data that can be analyzed in order to manage colonized spaces). … But according to Cole Harris, modern maps “conceptualized unfamiliar space in Eurocentric terms, situating it within a culture of vision, measurement, and management.”

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 311