Matthew Flinders et la mise en cartes d’un nouvel espace indo-pacifique

Abstract

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy captain Matthew Flinders concluded a circumnavigation and hydrographical survey of Australia. He drew most of the charts of his voyage when, returning to England during the Napoleonic wars, he was detained for more than six years in Mauritius, which at that time was the French Isle de France. Against a background of commercial ambitions and maritime and colonial rivalries between European nations, governments and institutions increasingly relied on maps as one of their fundamental form of knowledge to shape their enterprise.The paper investigates how Flinders’s charts participated in the construction of a new maritime space that connected Australia to the Indian Ocean and the world maritime space. It reflects that the making up of Flinders’s maps was influenced by their spatial and local contexts. It highlights the network of institutions and individuals above and beyond Flinders’s maps that controlled or informed them.

Keywords

• cartography
• historical geography
• Matthew Flinders
• spatial turn
• cross-circulation of knowledge
• Indo-Pacific space