Rosenberg and Grafton’s Cartographies of Time (2010) is a lovely book to look at. It has an elegant design, and is illustrated in four colour throughout. Most of the timelines mentioned are illustrated, and the large format, together with the colourful layout of many of the timelines shown, almost makes it a coffee-table book.
There, however, is one of the problems. Although this is a work of two established scholars, there is less engagement with the timelines described than I would wish. Clearly the authors (who are credited with many of the photos) have done a lot of research to find the timelines shown, even though they have typically shown English versions of timelines originally published in other languages. But many of the timelines are shown at such a small scale that you have to take the authors’ word for it about what the timeline is conveying. In other words, the design, rather than the content, often takes priority. Daniel Rosenberg, one of the authors, was responsible for an earlier, and intriguingly-titled “Timeline of Timelines”, but the same problem is apparent. The timeline looks good, until you try to use it. Paradoxically, this timeline is harder to read than a list of dates and events:
The squiggly lines are compressed time periods. This raises a fundamental point in Cartographies of Time, where great importance is attached to timelines having a regular spacing of dates. So much importance, in fact, that it is given its own name, “chronography”. The term is not defined in the text, and you won’t find it in the index, but it is the criterion used (largely) by the authors to restrict their subject to manageable proportions. The timeline, the infographic, and all kinds of tabular presentation tend to overlap, and it is difficult to separate them – especially as the authors describe their book as “an introductory grammar of the graphics of historical representation” [p23], which is much wider than perhaps they wanted for this book.
In practice, the book keeps straying beyond timelines, so there is the double problem of not looking at timelines themselves sufficiently, and including topics that are much better covered elsewhere. Examples include Minard’s famous infographic of the Napoleonic campaign in Russia “Minard’s famous 1869 diagram … produced results that were beautiful but ultimately put into question the promise of the straight line.” What does that mean? Does that reduce Minard’s achievement? Or does that mean that straight lines are not sufficient? Surely the world of timelines can accommodate whatever tools are most appropriate to present the relevant information.
A deeply questionable aspect is revealed by the description of devices used by missionaries to promote Christianity among the Native American peoples. While the authors take the time to describe the internecine warfare between Protestant and Catholic missionaries, there is no mention that in this case, chronologies were being used for a colonialist goal. I find it highly distasteful to imagine that timelines are value-free: we don’t need to think about the goals for which they were applied. The authors’ treatment could have dated from a hundred years ago, since the depiction of the Native Americans did not take their own views into account. Similarly, the purpose of graphics announcing the imminent end of the world must have led in many cases to unnecessary suffering and even death.
The most valuable aspect of the book for me is the two highlights: Eusebius and Joseph Priestley. Eusebius created a Chronicle, around 300 CE, with 19 parallel columns to show different civilizations co-existing in time. Apparently this presentation was derived from Origen’s six-column Bible. As for Priestley, the authors emphasise the importance of his two chronologies, his 1765 Chart of Biography, and A New Chart of History, 1769, covering events. These two charts, as the authors point out, are key, not just because they are “masterpieces of visual economy”, but because they remove the need to read, in the sense that they can be comprehended as a whole, even without reading all the details. Thus, one of the goals of many 18th-century chronologies was to show many more names from recent history for the arts, suggesting they were experiencing a golden age. For the biographies, “they are the lines that suggest the ideas, and this they do immediately, without the intervention of words”. Both chronologies, the authors state, became part of the reading culture of the time. For me, it is fascinating that Priestley was immersed in the 18th century dissenting culture, and hence outside the mainstream of formal education at Oxford and Cambridge. I would love to know how the visual presentation of knowledge, something that simplified access to knowledge, may at the same time have been a more effective way of communicating history than running text. It’s no surprise that the 2nd edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica and Diderot’s Encylopedie both made extensive use of timelines and chronologies, but in what way, and how? It’s revealing that the Wikipedia article for Priestley’s New Chart of History has more about how this chronology is organised than Rosenberg and Grafton do.
Instead, the authors use their available space for digressions, such as the cabinets of curiosities in the 16th- and 17th centuries, and many visually appealing 19th-century graphics predicting the forthcoming end of the world, before covering chronological games (such as the one patented by Mark Twain). Great fun, but not really part of the argument.
So, in conclusion, a revealing and highly researched book, but one that could have been so much better by having fewer timelines and exploring themes in more detail – and not ignoring the context.
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