The London exhibition exposes, with considerable acuity, the political nature of cartographic representation, but does so within a cultural and educational apparatus that pre-emptively neutralises the most radical edge of that critique.
The exhibition Secret Maps, currently on show at the British Library, presents itself first and foremost as an act of deliberate unveiling. Maps are not displayed in their familiar illustrative role, as inert mirrors of reality, but as active artefacts – instruments for selecting, ranking and concealing aspects of the world. The curatorial promise is explicit and ambitious: to render visible the operations of power upon the cartographic sheet, from historical colonialism to contemporary digital surveillance, and to recover the traces that dominant structures leave in the spaces they represent.
That promise is, for the most part, honoured at the level of the installation. Yet it is only when one considers the exhibition as a whole – the displays, the lecture series, study days, online courses, workshops and school programmes – that a more subtle and far from ingenuous movement becomes apparent. Secret Maps does not simply advance a critique of cartography; it stages a refined institutionalisation of that very critique. The British Library places the problem squarely in view, but also delineates, with great technical assurance, its epistemological boundaries, designates the legitimate interlocutors and pre-structures the pedagogical modes through which this critical discourse will be received and absorbed.
Against this background, the solidity of the theoretical framework underpinning the exhibition is unsurprising. The entire project is firmly situated within the now well-established paradigm of critical geography: the map is never a neutral instrument, but a productive technology of space. To map is to construct reality, to determine what may appear, to institute hierarchies of visibility and silence. The maps of the Indo-Pakistani Partition, the charts of South African apartheid, military topographical surveys, visualisations of urban poverty – all are mobilised to demonstrate, with little room for ambiguity, how power not only operates on territory but inscribes itself materially into its representations.
What is striking, however, is the extent to which this critical framework has been pacified. What once, in the work of J.B. Harley or Denis Wood, carried the force of a theoretical rupture – the claim that maps are first and foremost instruments of power rather than neutral supports for information – is now presented in Secret Maps as a kind of enlightened common sense, a new cliché of public discourse. The exhibition performs a valuable act of cartographic literacy, but it does so from within a theoretical horizon that has become hegemonic, largely devoid of internal tension and reconfigured as “reasonable” shared knowledge.
Visitors are not invited to question the premise of cartographic non-neutrality; they are asked rather to accept it as the narrative ground for a tidy historical arc that begins with cartography as an art of state and proceeds, via a number of now canonical episodes, to the critical self-awareness of the present. Within this storyline, the wounds of past mapping – however forcefully rendered – tend to appear more bounded and intelligible than the ambiguities of the contemporary moment. The violences of Partition or apartheid are presented as historical episodes with a certain degree of closure, while the present digital configurations of spatial power – more diffuse, more opaque, more pervasive – are predominantly visualised, rarely subjected to sustained analysis in terms of their algorithmic infrastructures.
It is in this light that the ambivalence of the institutional position becomes particularly clear. The British Library exhibits cartographic documents whose genealogy is deeply entangled with colonial, imperial and statist power relations. Many of the maps on display were produced precisely in order to govern, appropriate, partition or monitor territory; they are the output of administrative machines expressly designed for the exercise of domination. The curators do not shy away from this: Partition is narrated as a human catastrophe rather than a mere technical adjustment; apartheid is framed as a systemic process of spatial erasure; indigenous cartographies are presented as epistemic alternatives to imperial rationality.
And yet the positioning of the archive itself remains, in important respects, implicit. The British Library appears as the site that renders legible a history of cartographic violence, rather than as one of the agents through which that history has been constructed and continues to be administered. The institution’s role in accumulating, preserving, selecting and hierarchising maps is not itself taken as an object of theoretical interrogation; it is treated instead as a neutral precondition for the critical discourse that follows. The archive thus figures as guarantor of responsible management of cartographic memory rather than as one of the mechanisms through which that memory has been structured in a selective, often hierarchical fashion. Critique is brought to bear on the map as object, but does not fully extend to the archival regime that has shaped its curatorship and visibility.
This inflection becomes still more evident when one turns to the associated programme, beginning with Tim Marshall’s lecture on the “future map of the world”. The author of Prisoners of Geography reformulates, in an accessible register, a familiar determinist geopolitics: states are shaped by their basic geographical conditions – relief, climate, sea access, resource endowments – and international politics unfolds within that structural cage. To place Marshall at the centre of the public programme is anything but incidental: it amounts to a reaffirmation of the primacy of the classical geopolitical gaze, grounded in the political map, in state borders and “spheres of influence” as the primary grammar of planetary understanding.
Within such a framework, critique leaves the paradigm fundamentally intact. It updates, moderates and occasionally softens it, but does not overturn it. Cartographic distortions, manipulations and violences in the historical record are acknowledged and, in places, foregrounded; nonetheless, the idea that the world is to be apprehended and represented first and foremost as a mosaic of territorial states remains largely unquestioned. Other possible modes of spatial thought – networked geographies, multiple territorialities, spaces of flow, entangled ecologies that exceed the rigid grammar of the border – remain marginal, if not entirely absent.
The study day on the Partition of India, aimed at sixth-form students, both confirms and illustrates this trajectory. The “India Showing Civil Divisions” map, stamped “Top Secret”, becomes the focal point of a sophisticated teaching exercise: cartographic violence ceases to be a purely conceptual issue and appears instead as a document that can be read, discussed and dismantled. It is a didactically exemplary case, making visible in a single sheet the performative force of a pen-stroke that generates mass displacement, minorities, refugee camps.
Yet the very power of the case encourages a certain isolating and historicising effect. Partition is staged as a singular event – a before, a during and an after – and tends, as such, to be perceived as an exceptional moment rather than as an expression of logics that continue to operate, in subtler ways, through everyday practices of zoning, data collection, urban planning and territorial governance. Once converted into a model “case study”, Partition risks losing some of its capacity to address and unsettle the present.
The events with Katherine Rundell and Chris Haughton open up yet another dimension, explicitly pedagogical. Rundell, working with the maps of fantasy literature, shows how the imaginary geographies of novels help to shape particular ways of thinking about space: borders, routes and regions are not mere background but devices that educate the gaze. Haughton, reflecting on maps and information literacy, draws attention to the operations of selection, generalisation and omission that underpin any cartographic representation.
Here the curatorial team takes an important step. Maps are acknowledged not simply as tools that “describe” the world but as forms that participate in the formation of imagination and discipline perception from early childhood onwards. At the same time, this movement remains partial. The emphasis falls on producing critically aware subjects, capable of decoding the cartography available to them; far less on fostering political agents capable of claiming the power to produce counter-maps, of challenging the concentration of cartographic capacity in a few hands, or of inventing alternative modes of spatial representation. The power to map remains largely in the background, naturalised rather than exposed.
The online courses and school workshops complete this process of normalisation. The history of cartography is presented as a coherent genealogy in which even moments of rupture are ultimately reabsorbed into a continuous narrative. Classroom activities translate the conceptual issues raised by the exhibition into graded competences: reading a map critically, recognising signs of censorship, identifying absences, debating choices of scale and legend. Themes such as secrecy, censorship and manipulation are transposed from the register of conflict to that of regulated learning. What appears in the exhibition as a field of epistemic struggle becomes, in good part, curriculum content.
Within this architecture, the section devoted to digital cartography is arguably the most revealing point of weakness. Today the map is less than ever a finished object; it is an algorithmic process, an infrastructural element of computation, a key component of predictive systems governing flows, risks and access. Secret Maps does attempt to represent this transformation, suggesting that mobile devices continually generate maps of our movements and that such traces feed into surveillance and profiling regimes. But the discussion largely remains at the level of straightforward observation – “we are being tracked” – and occasional moral warning. There is little sustained engagement with the ways in which these invisible cartographies enter insurance risk models, credit-scoring systems, service allocation regimes or border management practices. On this terrain, the theoretical potential of critique stops short of a structural analysis, remaining at a loosely ethical register.
Taken as a whole, Secret Maps is a cultural machine of very high calibre. It makes a substantial body of specialist reflection available to a wide audience; it translates this material into a powerful museum language; it extends it through a coherent web of lectures, courses and educational paths. Yet it is precisely this accomplishment that discloses its limit. The critique of maps is fully integrated into the repertoire of a major national institution which manages it with considerable competence, without ever truly allowing its own role as director of the discourse to be put at stake.
The British Library demonstrates, with considerable effectiveness, the power that inhabits maps; it is less willing to interrogate its own position in relation to that power. The one “secret” the exhibition does not quite bring into the open is perhaps this: that, today as in the past, the capacity to map the world – in both its visible and its opaque strata – remains heavily concentrated. Large public institutions constitute an important element within that constellation, but not necessarily the most decisive one. Their ability to welcome and refine critique does not yet coincide with a genuine redistribution of the power to draw the maps that matter.
Secret Maps
London, British Library
Until 18 January 2026
Catalogue: British Library, 256 pp., €50
