Mountains Made in Switzerland: Facts and Concerns in Nineteenth-Century Cartography

Argument Cultural history has investigated the appropriation of mountain wilderness in considerable detail, without however systematically including the contributions of science and technology in the process. This paper suggests a way of filling this gap. It argues that cartography was instrumental in giving mountains their modern shape. In the course of the nineteenth century, mountains arguably gained a new factual existence at the intersection of new aesthetic, scientific, economic, and political concerns with landscape. Taking the case of Swiss cartography, the paper shows how mapmakers strived to represent this matter of concern in ever more perfect ways, culminating in the three-dimensional rendering of mountains as plaster reliefs. The paper concludes with the observation that this transformation is to a certain extent irreversible. The mountains made in Switzerland in the nineteenth century are probably here to stay.