This book provides an insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live.

John Pickles is Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Part1. Introduction 1. Maps and Worlds Part 2. Deconstructing the Map 2. What Do Maps Represent? The Crisis of Representation and the Critique of Cartographic Reason 3. Situated pragmatics: Maps and Mapping as Social Practice Part 3. The Over-Coded World: A Genealogy of Modern Mapping 4. The Cartographic Gaze, Global Visions, and Modalities of Visual Culture 5. Cadasters and Capitalism: The Emergence of a New Map Consciousness 6. Mapping the Geo-Body: State, Territory, and Nation 7. Commodity and Control: Technologies of the Social Body Part 4. Investing Bodies in Depth 8. Cyber-Empires: Cartographic Reason and the Technological Sublime in a Digital Age Part 5. Conclusion 9. Counter-Mappings: Cartographic Reason in the Age of Intelligent Machines and Smart Bombs