Abstract
This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality', a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 7-46 |
| Number of pages | 40 |
| Journal | Ecumene |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2000 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Braun Bruce Department of Geography, University of Minnesota 01 2000 7 1 7 46 This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental . Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature. sagemeta-type Journal Article search-text Introduction Government is the right disposition of things . . . I do not think this is a matter of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to . . . accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc. (Michel Foucault)1 n 20 April 1878, George Mercer Dawson, a diminutive 28-year-old geologist employed by the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), left Montreal for the Queen Charlotte Islands, located 70 miles off Canada's west coast.2 Travelling Ecumene 2000 7 (1) 0967-4608(00)EU181OA © 2000 Arnold PRODUCING VERTICAL TERRITORY: GEOLOGY AND GOVERNMENTALITY IN LATE VICTORIAN CANADA Bruce Braun This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for dis- cussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality', a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature. O first by rail to San Francisco, then north by sea, Dawson arrived in Victoria, the capital of Canada's newest and westernmost province on 13 May. In his journals, Dawson recorded that the next two weeks were spent 'looking after equipment and preparations', and the 'innumerable little things' that one had to attend to before an extended season of field research: locating a suitable vessel, hiring a crew, procuring provisions, calibrating and testing instruments, and repairing equipment damaged along the way. After additional delays for repairs to his ves- sel, Dawson departed for the Queen Charlottes on 27 May, arriving off Cape St. James the islands' southernmost point on 12 June, seven weeks after he left Montreal (see Figure 1). For the next two months Dawson travelled north along the east coast of the islands collecting geological and botanical samples, sketch- ing the strata of exposed rock formations, mapping areas that remained uncer- tain on existing charts, collecting artefacts and other information from the Haida, the islands' indigenous inhabitants, and recording observations in a daily 'log book' (along with precise measurements of longitude and latitude, daily temperatures and so on). On 29 August he began the long return trip, stopping 8 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Figure 1 ~ Route of George Mercer Dawson's journey to the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1878 (Source: D. Cole and B. Lockner, To the Charlottes, Vancouver, UBC Press, 1993) in Victoria to prepare specimens for shipment to GSC headquarters in Montreal, before retracing his route to San Francisco and then across the continent, arriving home on 10 November 1878. Dawson's journey brought valuable information about Canada's west coast to centres of economic and political calculation in Ontario and Quebec. But this constituted only one portion of his annual labours. The remainder of his year was spent in Montreal, where he had at his disposal not only the logbooks and specimens from his own journeys but also a large archive of other geological observations, maps and diagrams from across Canada and abroad.3 This per- mitted detailed comparison, and enabled Dawson to correlate the exposed strata he had observed in the Queen Charlottes with observations he and others had made elsewhere along the coast and in the interior of British Columbia, fixing the rock formations on the islands within the larger stratigraphical order of Canada's west coast, and locating these strata within a universally accepted geo- logical taxonomy. The result of his winter's labour was a lengthy report which included, in addition to a general overview of the geography of the islands, a number of geological maps (Figure 2), and diagrams of the 'inner architecture' of particular sites (Figure 3).4 These maps and diagrams were published by the GSC and disseminated to libraries, government officials, scientists, prospectors and investors. In turn, the specimens which Dawson collected were subject to chemical analysis, classified, and placed on display in the GSC's museum, as part of a growing inventory and public display of Canada's mineral and botanical resources. By May of the following year Dawson and other geologists were pre- pared for yet another season's work in the field, armed with additional knowl- edge and ready to ask new questions of the landscapes and peoples encountered. By almost any account, Dawson's 1878 journey to the Queen Charlotte Islands was remarkable. The province of British Columbia had only recently joined the Dominion, and its capital, Victoria, was as yet only a remote island of European settlement geographically and epistemologically in a vast region whose phys- ical terrain and cultural geographies were only beginning to be known, and where forms of colonial power extended only as far as military force, European networks of communication and modern regimes of power/knowledge extended.5 It is not surprising, then, that writing on Dawson has taken the form of heroic biography.6 In this paper, however, I turn to Dawson's sketches, maps and reports not to trace the physical and intellectual feats of a remarkable indi- vidual, but to initiate discussion of the complex relationship between the social construction of nature, and forms of political rationality (or what Michel Foucault called 'governmentality'), in the modern west. By relating the scien- tific labour of Dawson and other geologists to new rules and regulations for the administration of 'mineral lands' that emerged in Canada at the end of the nine- teenth century, as well as to practices designed in the same period to train Canadians to understand and use the land in terms of its geology, I address two distinct but related questions. The first, engaging debates in political theory, asks how and to what extent nature and in particular, nature's intelligibility is taken into account in histories and theories of state rationality. The second, Producing vertical territory 9 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) 10 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Producing vertical territory 11 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) set within debates in Marxist and Green theory, asks which practices and his- torical dynamics should be seen as central to nature's social production. The 'nature' of governmentality At stake in the first of these issues are the very terms in which state rationality is framed in political and social theory. This paper critiques and extends Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality', developed in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s.7 As I explain in more detail later, Foucault argued that in Europe, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the question of 'how to rule' shifted from a problematic of 'sovereignty' (how to protect the fragile link between the Prince and his territory) to a problematic of 'govern- mentality' (how to optimize the relation between 'men and things', so as to make the forces of the state increase from within). For Foucault, this transition was coterminous with the beginning of an era of 'bio-power' (which he described as the entry of 'life' into history), and, in turn, gave rise to novel forms of polit- ical rationality which sought to produce 'governing effects' on the conduct of individuals. Although Foucault's lectures on governmentality have never been published, the outlines of his project are well known and have led to numerous analyses of the knowledge of state and tactics of government that emerged in Europe during the period, ranging from statistics, and the role it played in bring- ing new domains like 'population' and 'economy' into the realm of political cal- culation, to instruments and practices such as taxation or agricultural and educational reform, through which individuals were compelled or trained to conduct themselves and to organize their relation to 'things' resources, machines, land, and so on in such a way as to optimize the health and wealth of the state and its people.8 Few commentators, however, have taken up Foucault's suggestion that one of the unique aspects of modern forms of political rationality was that the prob- lem of population and its improvement necessarily brought the state directly into contact with its territory and more precisely, with the qualities of this territory.9 Those who have, have greatly enriched our understanding of how political ratio- nalities directed at optimizing the use of the state's territory have become part of how modern ecological change occurs, or to use language indebted to Marxism, how nature is socially produced. As K. Sivaramakrishnan argues, an investigation of the multiple temporalities and diverse accommodations of gov- ernmentality allows 'a more sophisticated account of processes that reorganize nature'.10 Yet these analyses remain incomplete. While usefully re-inserting nature into Foucault's thought, they leave the category of 'nature' unexam- ined.11 In this they follow Foucault, who, while recognizing that governmental practices related 'men' to 'territory with its qualities', had little to say about ter- ritory or its qualities, with the result that the cultural practices through which the land and territory took objective form remained unthought.12 In Foucault's work 'territory' merely contained a set of pre-given 'things'. In turn, the mod- ern state was seen to devise instruments like property and taxation regimes which regulated the relation of people to these things. These 'things' may very 12 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) well have been geographically differentiated, resulting in uneven and hetero- geneous governmental practices, but their legibility and availability to forms of economic and political calculation appeared to require no explanation. As a result, the impetus behind the development of instruments and tactics of gov- ernment was seen to arise only from such things as the development of statis- tics, the extension of such measurement into ever new spheres (such as health and sexuality) or transformations in capitalism more broadly (in response to which the state was obliged continually to order and reorder its 'economy', 'resources' and 'citizens' and the relations between them). In what follows, I open to enquiry Foucault's seemingly innocent and self-evi- dent phrase 'territory with its qualities' in order to bring into view additional practices that shaped modern European forms of governmentality: specifically, the historical and cultural practices by which the 'inert objectness' of nature was constructed and new domains of economic and political calculation brought into being. I accept as self-evident the argument that Foucault's formulation of governmentality understood as involving the relation of 'men and things' opens possibilities for reasserting the centrality and agency of 'nature' in mod- ern forms of political rationality. My concerns lie elsewhere. The problem with Foucault's formulation, as well as that of his critics and admirers, is that nature's 'difference' is seen to lie entirely outside history: 'territory with its qualities' is merely the ground upon which forms of political rationality, arising elsewhere in the social field, unfold.13 The work of George Mercer Dawson and other geol- ogists with the GSC, can be made to interrupt such accounts. By attending to the 'geologizing' of the space of the Canadian state, I argue that what counts as 'territory with its qualities' was historically contingent, rather than fixed, and that forms of governmentality, such as arose in late nineteenth-century Canada, hinged on nature's intelligibility. As I demonstrate in what follows, an emerging discourse of 'geology' in the early 1800s not only enabled landscapes to be vis- ible in new ways (bringing into view the 'verticality' of the state's territory) but also provided an impetus for the founding of national 'surveys' like the GSC, and allowed new sets of instruments and practices to be devised by the state which were designed to compel inhabitants to optimize the use of the state's territory. In brief, one cannot understand 'governmentality' apart from how the territory of the state is brought into being as a space of difference, any more than one can understand forms of state rationality apart from the historical emer- gence of 'population' as a problem of government. Social productions of nature The second issue can be introduced in more abbreviated form. At stake here is what counts as 'generative processes' in social and ecological change. For geo- graphers like Neil Smith and David Harvey, nature's social production is largely a story of its commodification.14 Certainly, with the extension of the commod- ity form into ever more domains (and ever more intensively), such explanations are compelling. Yet on their own they are insufficient. By showing how nature's ordering in and through modern forms of knowledge is related to, and in part Producing vertical territory 13 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) constitutive of, the ways in which nature is integrated into forms of economic and political rationality, I argue for a broader sense of 'production' that focuses on how nature is continuously reconstituted at the intersection of multiple, inter- woven practices. This permits two additional observations. First, it is not enough merely to install state rationality alongside capital as a force that mediates nature's pro- duction. One must go further: it is necessary also to see how histories of nature's enframing, and histories of nature's production in state practices and capitalist production, are coterminous (something that is clearly evident today in fields like biotechnology). To put this differently, recent approaches to nature's social construction which stress the so-called 'implosion' of the epistemological and the ontological are not, as some have charged, idealisms which collapse the material into the discursive, but rather point to the simple fact that this implo- sion is achieved continuously in the mundane practices of daily life, whether by scientists, state officials or workers.15 Nor is this unique to end-of-millennium cybercultures. As I outline below, at the end of the nineteenth century the phys- ical spaces daily transformed by mining were intricately intertwined with the epistemological spaces opened up by the discourse of geology. The second obser- vation follows from, and extends, the first. Rather than positing the production of nature as involving a singular and unified social logic, it is perhaps more use- ful to explode 'production' into multiple, heterogeneous practices, thereby bringing theories of nature's social production developed most persuasively by Marxist geographers more in line with the work of various postructuralists like Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, whose guiding concepts ('assemblages', 'networks' and so on) require that we attend to multiple and intertwined social, epistemological and political processes. The remainder of the paper explores this interlinking of nature, science, and political and economic calculation, in three sections. First, drawing on the work of Bruno Latour and historians of geology, I return to Dawson's description of Canada's west coast in order to investigate the ways in which his representations of the region's landscapes were historical rather than natural situated within specific historical geographies of 'seeing' and 'ordering' nature. From here I move on to consider the consequences of this 'geologizing' of the space of the nation-state for forms of economic and political rationality, including efforts by the state to compel individual and corporate actors to 'do the right thing' in relation to a territory that now had an important sense of verticality.16 Finally, I ask what this can tell us about the relation between the 'cultural construction' of nature and its 'social production', and about the multiple sites, processes, his- tories and politics present concurrently in modern artefactual natures. Geologizing nature Only as phenomenology is ontology possible. (Martin Heidegger)17 In what sense can we say that 'territory and its qualities' is historically contin- gent? Initially, such an assertion jars as much as the claim that nature is 'pro- 14 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) duced'. Yet, examined more closely, it makes sense on two levels. First, ecolo- gists today argue that nature is characterized by almost constant change, not homeostasis. Second, far from constituting a field of readily intelligible objects, nature enters into history in part through its cultural legibility.18 In his reports for the GSC, Dawson produced a series of views of the struc- ture or internal architecture of parts of Canada's west coast. In sketches of rock outcroppings he recorded the location and condition of strata and noted folds and faults (see Figure 3), while in diagrams or cross-sections, he mapped both the horizontal and vertical axis of the region's formations, placing them in rela- tion to yet other cross-sections elsewhere and situating the whole within a larger order that transcended the merely 'local' or 'phenomenal'. For years he con- tributed maps of both the surface and subterranean geology of large areas of western Canada to the Survey's annual reports. His 1878 map of Skidegate Inlet (see Figure 2) exemplifies these. Produced in Montreal, months after his recon- naissance of the Queen Charlotte Islands, it presents the region as a geological landscape, using the standardized colour scheme of the GSC to represent its superficial geology, and a series of cross-sections (marked on the map as run- ning from points A to B, and C to D) to present its hidden vertical structure. It should be noted that this constituted a remarkable reterritorialization of the islands, erasing existing social natures in Skidegate Inlet and, in their place, restaging the landscape as a solely geological artefact. Although the inlet was intensively used, and contained a substantial Haida population, the presence of the Haida was recognized only obliquely through the siting of 'Skidegate Village' in the upper right-hand corner of the map.19 For my present purposes, the sig- nificance of this map lies in its representation of the inlet in terms of its 'stratig- raphy'. Today, the observation that Dawson saw and described the land in terms of its underlying structure is unremarkable, so accustomed are we to the lan- guage, concepts and diagrams of stratigraphical geology. Yet it is precisely through the naturalization of this geological vision that 'territory with its qual- ities' today presents itself to political theory as a given, something that lies out- side histor y. In the following section I historicize Dawson's geological seeing in order to bring into view a shifting complex of knowledges which underwrote governmental rationality in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century. Histories of seeing There was nothing inevitable about the way that landscapes like the Queen Charlotte Islands appeared to George Dawson in 1878, although the contingent nature of Dawson's vision was disguised by his own, and also the state's, descrip- tion of his project as involving no more than the objective recording of nature's 'truths'.20 Today, historicizing Dawson's enframing of west coast landscapes is a relatively straightforward undertaking. By the end of the eighteenth century, British explorers like James Cook and George Vancouver, the French explorer La Pérouse and numerous Spanish and American explorers and traders had described and sketched the landscapes of Canada's Pacific coast in considerable detail, contributing to an enormous archive in European centres of calculation. Producing vertical territory 15 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) A brief comparison between these earlier images and Dawson's sketches and dia- grams 90 years later shows a marked contrast. In 1786 La Pérouse was content to sketch a series of profiles that outlined the general appearance of the Pacific coast from specific coordinates at sea (Figure 4). Cook's artists eight years ear- lier did much the same, but also provided much more detailed portraits of spe- cific sites (Figure 5). Yet, as seen in William Ellis' sketch of King George's Sound (Nootka Sound) on the west coast of Vancouver Island, when rocks and moun- tains appeared there was no suggestion that they might have an intelligible 'inner structure'. Likewise, Vancouver's crew, travelling in 1792, saw the land- scape only in terms of its surface and not its depth. Theirs was a pastoral vision that took delight in the appearance of prospects and open meadows, and prob- ably for this reason they found the heavily forested region 'dull' and 'monoto- nous'.21 In none can we find anything even remotely resembling a geological vision, attuned to signs by which to interpret the inner structure of the land- scape. The more daunting question is how to account for the difference. One could posit several explanations, each consistent with competing views on scientific progress found in European philosophy and social theory. One could choose, for instance, to understand the difference in terms of the inevitable unfolding of Reason, where Dawson stands at the end of a progressive enlightenment, one discovery leading to the next like links in a chain. By this view, it was only a mat- ter of time before a 'true' picture of nature emerged. Or, with the empiricist, 16 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Figure 4 ~ La Pérouse's views of the north-west coast of America (Source: J. de la Pérouse, A Voyage Around the World, Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1968) one might argue that the difference lay in discipline and method. If only Cook, Vancouver and La Pérouse had been able to put aside their particular interests, similar results would have been produced, since what is 'there' in nature does not change. By such accounts Dawson appears a more patient and rigorous observer, while Cook, La Pérouse and Vancouver lacked both rigour and a truly 'scientific' approach. Or, taking a more materialist tack, one might explain the difference in terms of social and economic imperatives. Dawson, after all, travelled after the Industrial Revolution, and was particularly attuned to the presence of mineral deposits, especially coal. In contrast, Cook's interests (and anxieties) were cartographic, La Pérouse sought to place future travels on a firm footing, and Vancouver was preoccupied with geopolitical contests between the British and Spanish. By this view, Dawson's sketches of the 'inner architecture' of the Queen Charlottes merely reflected underlying social and economic processes that determined in advance what would be seen in nature. Each of these explanations, however, is too grandiose: they posit changing knowledges on the scale of 'Reason', 'mind' or 'mode of production', and ignore what Bruno Latour describes as the 'precise practice and craftsmanship of know- Producing vertical territory 17 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Figure 5 ~ Sketch of Nootka Sound by William Ellis, on Captain Cook's third voyage (Source: R. Joppien and B. Smith, The Art of Captain Cook's Voyage, III, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1988) ing'.22 This does not mean that the development of industrial capitalism was unimportant to the emergence of a 'geological' vision, only that it is insufficient as an explanation, since it fails to account for the specific spatial, cultural and representational practices that enabled the science of geology to emerge.23 Nor is my comparison of Dawson with the others meant to imply that Dawson's rep- resentations of the coast were qualitatively no different than the others, or that we cannot make statements about which were more useful both in the past and the present. It means only to suggest that this difference cannot be explained through appeals to 'nature', 'reason' or 'economy' but instead must be under- stood in terms of much more mundane historical and spatial practices that gave rise to particular modalities of 'seeing' and 'knowing' nature. To use David Turnbull's phrase, it involves attending to the construction of 'knowledge spaces', those contingent processes of making 'assemblages' and 'linkages' that draw together people, instruments, theories and practices at a variety of sites, so as to make knowledge possible.24 In brief, any explanation of Dawson's vision must focus on how a specifically geological vision came into being, in Europe and centres of European settlement abroad, in the early 1800s.25 For this, Latour's notion of 'cycles of accumulation' and his related concepts of 'immutable mobiles' and 'centres of calculation' offer a helpful framework. By 'cycles of accumulation' Latour refers to the spa- tio-temporal circuits through which, during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, things from disparate places came to be collected, compared and combined.26 These included 'journeys of discovery' by European explorers, the activities of traders and more everyday and highly gendered and class-specific practices like that of gentlemen naturalists touring the Alps or the Scottish highlands. By 'immutable mobiles' Latour refers to those things specimens, maps, sketches, measurements, and other 'inscriptions' which could withstand displacement from one spatial location to another without distortion. In other words, things that were not too large to move, that retained their qualities in transit, and that, crucially, existed in a form that allowed them to be compared with, or superimposed on, other objects or information. The significance of immutable mobiles lay not only in the fact that they could be 'gathered and dis- placed', but in the fact that they could be presentable 'all at once' to individu- als who had not been there themselves. Gathered at centres of calculation museums, botanical gardens, mining schools, private collections and so on these immutable mobiles could be accumulated, classified and combined, such that both specific knowledges and general systems of classification could be con- structed (these in turn could be translated into new inscriptions and dissemi- nated and compared with other collections elsewhere). Latour argues that in any subsequent cycle of accumulation, knowledges pro- duced through the previous cycle could be used strategically, or could form the basis for a new set of questions that could be asked of landscapes and peoples encountered.27 Thus, at the end of each 'cycle' what mattered in the lands Europeans travelled to, and what explorers, traders and administrators were able to 'see' in them, were no longer the same, such that at the beginning of each new cycle emissaries were sent out to bring other things back. 18 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Cycles of accumulation: from mineralogy to geology Returning to Dawson's maps, sketches and diagrams, it now becomes possible to see why his representations of the Pacific coast of North America differed so dramatically from those of Cook, Vancouver and La Pérouse. Stated baldly, when earlier explorers travelled the coast, geology, as a 'way of seeing', did not indeed could not exist; no matter how carefully they gazed at these lands, they could never have seen them in terms of their 'inner structure'. As historians of geology have explained, what existed at the end of the eighteenth century was an entirely different descriptive science: mineralogy.28 In other words, between Cook and Dawson lay vast movements of people, inscriptions, instruments and translations that constituted several cycles of accumulation. These cycles can be represented schematically, beginning with 'mineralogy' at the beginning of one cycle and ending with 'geology' two cycles later (Table 1). Like other branches of natural history, mineralogy dealt primarily with the collection, sorting, naming and classification of individual mineral specimens. Indeed, as evident in the journals of Cook, La Pérouse and Vancouver, they and their crews were consummate collectors, returning to Europe with countless curiosities. Other explorers did the same, as did gentleman naturalists, miners, travellers and so on, who together formed part of a larger 'culture of collect- ing' associated with the 'science of specimens' that characterized the eighteenth century.29 Such collecting was hardly uniform, spatially or temporally; it was con- tingent on specific practices and on interactions with a variety of actors that fol- lowed no single pattern.30 The result of these uneven practices, however, was that specimens from disparate sites were gathered in private museums, mineral cabinets and the like, where it was possible not only to describe but to compare and classify. As Latour stresses, the significance of these centres of calculation was that in them diverse objects from far away in space and time could be pre- sented synoptically to the eye.31 Moreover, comparison was not limited to those mineral specimens present at hand, but also with other 'immutable mobiles' sketches collected in publications and catalogues, for instance such that authoritative classifications schemes could emerge which, like in botany and zoology, revealed the 'hierarchical structure' of the mineral kingdom. The cir- Producing vertical territory 19 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Table 1 ~ From mineralogy to stratigraphy: cycles of accumulation and the construction of 'geological' knowledge Field Centres of calculation Activity Collection Calculation Combination Knowledge 1st cycle mineral mineralogy topographical mineral distribution specimens (description and maps: primary vs. formations (La Pérouse, classification) secondary rocks 1780s) 2nd cycle rock masses geognosy equivalents from correlation (description and elsewhere stratigraphy classification) (superposition) (Dawson, 1870s) culation of these proxies had the effect of spreading classificatory systems as widely as the books in which they were contained were bought and sold, or, in the case of explorers, carried in their journeys.32 At centres of calculation different types of inscription could be compared and combined, facilitated in part by the emergence of specific 'social spaces' of sci- ence in cities like London, which enabled the exchange of ideas, specimens and taxomonies (and which also served to make science an exclusive preserve of upper-class men). Collections of rocks, for instance, could be, and often were, combined with topographical maps to reveal a distribution of minerals. By plot- ting where particular specimens were found, spatial patterns could be perceived, and, as Martin Rudwick explains, this, in conjunction with a common distinc- tion made at the time between primary and secondary rocks was at least par- tially responsible for the development of the concept of formations whereby certain minerals became associated with groups of broadly similar rocks that could be differentiated from other rock groups.33 What I have briefly traced is one cycle of accumulation through which the collection of specimens, observations and other inscriptions at many different sites around the globe and their movement back to centres of calculation allowed for the emergence of an ordered system of knowledge. This is neces- sarily schematic: a more thorough account would almost certainly reveal frag- mented and contested fields, and would need to attend to the heterogeneous character of practices of collection and comparison, to contests over interpre- tation, as well as to economic developments, such as the emergence of the min- ing industry, which resulted in a continuous flow of specimens and controversies. For my purposes, however, what is significant about this initial cycle of accu- mulation is that in the interval between its beginning and its end what it meant to 'see' and what was 'there to be seen' in specific landscapes changed dra- matically.34 By the first decades of the 1800s mineralogists were no longer concerned with minerals alone, but with locating and analysing formations, since it was now widely understood that the presence of one sort of rock, or a type of fossil, sig- nified the possible presence of particular minerals. Armed with this new ability to 'read' rocks, individuals departed for the field in order to mobilize and inter- rogate nature in new ways. In subsequent journeys, for instance, attention turned to the observation and collection of formations, initiating another cycle at the end of which 'seeing' and what was 'available to be seen' would be transformed yet again. Unlike before, entire rock masses were now of greatest interest, and it was possible, even desirable, to attend to the structure of individual formations, giving rise to the study and calculation of vertical sequences, illustrated by Georges Cuvier's careful sketches of strata from around Paris (Figure 6). This came to be known as geognosy a branch of mineralogy concerned with the classification of rock masses and their spatial relation.35 Although these vertical sequences were too large to be brought back physically, they could be trans- ported in the form of diagrams; and as with mineral specimens, these diagrams could be compared, combined and translated. This allowed specific vertical sequences recorded at one site to be related to others recorded elsewhere, and, 20 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Producing vertical territory 21 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) through the principle of 'superposition' (the idea that lower layers were formed earlier than later ones), strata could be seen to stand in a regular and pre- dictable relation, even between sites far removed. In short, at centres of calculation a science concerned with the classification of rock masses had, by the 1830s, been transformed into a science concerned with correlation of strata across space, leading by the 1830s to attempts to develop an internationally accepted nomenclature of strata that could be applied globally (Figure 7). By the mid-1800s an entirely new earth science had emerged historical (or 'stratigraphical') geology whereby a 'universal' structure of the earth was now the object of inquiry, a project that was for the most part com- plete by the time Dawson began his travels. In the span of less than 100 years a dramatic shift had occurred, from collecting specimens and viewing the phys- ical outline of landscapes to 'seeing geologically'. What was visible in nature had changed irrevocably: one no longer attended to scattered mineral samples or other curiosities, but to the 'inner architecture' of the earth. Whereas Cook, La Pérouse and Vancouver stood at the beginning of the first cycle, Dawson, as he departed Montreal for the west coast in the spring of 1878, stood at the end of the second, trained to see the earth very differently. Legible natures: geology and economic and political calculation Representing and intervening, knowledge and power, understanding and reform, are built in, from the start, as simultaneous goals and means. (Paul Rabinow)36 At stake in this abbreviated history of the transition from mineralogy to geol- ogy is the historical specificity of nature's 'legibility' on Canada's West Coast in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Dawson, with his keenly trained eye for geology, was a central figure in rendering the coast a geological space during this period, but he was certainly not alone. Other GSC scientists trav- elled the coast and large parts of the interior of British Columbia with an acute sensitivity to the region's hidden structure. So did employees from the Province's Department of Mines, individual miners and prospectors, engineers, journalists, and capitalists from eastern Canada and abroad, the latter wishing to avoid sinking money into unprofitable ventures. This was far from a uniform group: levels of geological expertise varied widely, and the degree to which spe- cific regions were investigated was far from even. What they shared, however, was a belief that the earth had a rational and ultimately knowable order, one which could be 'read' from the rocks. By the time of Dawson's travels this belief was widely accepted, although debates continued over which physical processes had formed the region's spec- tacular terrain. Dawson himself was a prominent participant in these debates, recognized widely as an expert on glaciation.37 Yet, while he and his GSC col- leagues were expected to carry on such 'scientific' investigations, they were also charged with the more practical task of extending the reach of geology's visual order to the furthest corners of the Dominion, making of the nation a single geological specimen that could be understood as a legible and logical whole. 22 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Producing vertical territory 23 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) This newly found legibility had enormous consequences. What Martin Rudwick has termed geology's 'optical consistency' not only introduced new lev- els of certainty; it opened new epistemological spaces which, in turn, made pos- sible new domains for economic and political rationality. As Latour explains, in a brief reference to geology, without this consistency, 'the layers of the earth stay hidden and no matter how many travelers and diggers move around there is no way to sum up their travels, visions and claims'.38 With this consistency and its spatial extension by Dawson and others Canada's 'nature' could enter history in new ways. This would have important consequences for the mixing of capi- tal, labour and land, but also for the regulation of 'men and things': for how the Canadian state perceived, acted towards and organized its 'territory', as well as for how individual subjects were constituted and related to these newly legible spaces. Enframing and capitalizing nature Perhaps the most obvious consequence of the geologizing of Canada's territory was that it enabled such places as Canada's west coast to be drawn into global circuits of extractive capital. Indeed, the activities of Dawson, and the GSC more generally, illustrate well the intersection of science, nature and capital. Discourses like geology are charged with instrumentality. It should come as no surprise, then, that by the 1870s Dawson, and others working for the GSC, slid freely between the visual language of 'geology' and the speculative language of 'value'. Take, for instance, a passage from a report written by Dawson the year prior to his journey to the Queen Charlotte Islands which drew on his own, and others', earlier travels along the coast. The coals and lignites of the west are found at various horizons in the Secondary and Tertiary rocks, which in the eastern regions are developed on a comparatively small scale, and not coal-producing. Valuable coal deposits, may yet, however, be found in the Carboniferous formation proper of the far west; and where, as on some parts of the west coast, the calcareous rocks of this age are largely replaced by argillaceous and arenaceous beds, the probability of the discovery of coal is greatest. I believe, indeed, that in a few localities in Nevada, coaly shales, used to some extent as fuel in the absence of better, are found in rocks supposed to be of this age. The discovery of certain fossils in 1876 in the limestones of the Lower Cache Creek group now allow these, and probably also the associated quartzites and other rocks to be correlated with this period; and it is worthy of mention that black shales, with a considerable percentage of anthracitic carbon, occur in connection with these in several places; and may yet be found, in some parts of their extension, to become of economic value . . . . Rocks of the same age with the coal-bearing series of the Queen Charlotte Islands are probably present also on the Mainland, where fossils indicating a horizon both somewhat higher, and a little lower in the geological scale have already been found . . .39 Notable in this passage is how geology serves to point to an underlying 'order', even if this order has not yet been directly observed. Great significance is placed on certain signs fossils for instance which allow specific rocks to be corre- 24 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) lated with others elsewhere. The passage is infused with the language of prob- ability. The presence of certain indicators suggests the presence nearby of par- ticular rocks and minerals. And already, at this early stage in the mapping of the region's 'internal architecture', this geological language of probability speaks in the tongue of an economic and political language of possibility. What Dawson's passage convincingly demonstrates is that in the development and extension of geological discourse in the late 1800s, the 'substratum' of the earth in Canada became a new 'frontier' for capital, as the relentless search for profit seized upon the nation's newly intelligible domains.40 Moreover, geology's translation of rocks into 'inscriptions', as found in Dawson's reports, sketches and maps, allowed the abstraction of west coast nature from its local site to dis- tant arenas. The significance of the 'cycles of accumulation' described in the previous section was not simply that at one location things from other places could be presented synoptically to the eye, but that this allowed for the mobi- lization of resources and capital. From London, New York or Montreal it was now possible to view the 'true structure' of Canada's nature without having to be there in person; the circulation of one inscription, the geological map, per- mitted the circulation of another, money. From the 1850s on, geological specimens and maps from Canada circulated widely in Europe, and were among the most popular exhibits at the London Exhibition (1850), and the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1855). The mam- moth Geology of Canada and its accompanying maps, published by the GSC in 1863, won praise both nationally and internationally as 'reliable guides to mining enterprise' and were instrumental in the reinvention of Canada as a 'mineral nation'.41 In the following decades, one of the important tasks of the GSC was the collection and organization of exhibits that travelled the globe, pre- senting the 'geological' nation as a field for investment. Yet, while the circulation of maps, reports and specimens in Eastern Canada and Europe was crucial to raising capital for mining endeavours in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada, it is important not to overstate the appar- ent isomorphism of knowledge spaces and economic spaces. Supporters of geolog- ical surveys, at both the national and provincial levels, often greatly inflated the role that such information played in inducing investment. Mineral surveys were extolled for 'placing the value of [resources] before the public'; with such sur- veys, it was asserted, 'capitalists will no longer hesitate to invest when such promising results are held out'.42 In practice, the relation between the produc- tion of geological knowledge and investment was more complicated. To begin, there was the problem of uneven coverage. As late as 1895, the British Columbia Minister of Mines reported that 'comparatively little is yet known regarding the geology of the interior of Vancouver Island', despite its proximity to Victoria. This was 'partly owing to its rugged nature and thick undergrowth', but also 'to the limited amount of geological work thus far undertaken'.43 Perhaps unknown to the minister, the region had been surveyed by George Dawson. Yet, as Dawson explained in 1897, he had never written up his 1875 investigations, partly because he thought more fieldwork was needed, and partly because it 'had been postponed for other duties'. Nor was this work likely to occur soon, Producing vertical territory 25 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) since, as Dawson explained two years later, the GSC had found it necessary 'to divert our surveys to points where they seem most useful . . . and the force at disposal for such work is small compared to the field.'44 Second, despite Dawson's explanations in this case, the locations of GSC sur- veys were not all determined by apparent 'usefulness'. John Tyrell's extensive surveys of the Canadian north, widely criticized at the time as a waste of effort, are perhaps the most famous example of work that had no immediate economic rationale. Indeed, what determined the immediate utility of GSC surveys was often less what was 'found' than the accessibility of the region surveyed. Finally, geological maps of such a vast territory as Canada, even presented at the scale of Dawson's map of Skidegate Inlet, could offer only a general overview of the region's geological structure. The extension of mining enterprises to new regions most often followed upon the discovery of specific minerals by prospec- tors who operated at a much smaller scale, and were guided less by maps (which in many cases were not available for the territory covered in their tours) than by their own ability to interpret the earth's 'code'. This does not mean that their discoveries were accidental. Quite the opposite: prospectors often had a keen sense of geology, and this only serves to demonstrate the pervasiveness of a specifically geological vision by the last decades of the nineteenth century. Nor does it diminish the importance of systematic surveys like those produced by the GSC. In those areas surveyed, they served as a general guide for further prospecting, and provided a rough means by which to calculate the probability of success. At centres of economic calculation, they gave the crucial appearance that the mining industry in Canada was founded on logical premises, increas- ing investor confidence. And, for entrepreneurs and investors both in Canada and abroad, they served the important role of providing insurance against imposture and the squandering of resources. Armed with the maps and reports of the GSC, investors and mining company executives, from their offices in Montreal, New York or London, could evaluate the claims that came from Canada's frontiers, relating them to what was known of the country's 'internal structure'. Geology and governmentality Much more can be said about the relation between 'enframing' and 'capitaliz- ing' nature.45 The main point is that practices of representation deeply cultural and historical in character are both central to and necessary for nature's mate- rial transformation in circuits of capital. Social natures are, in part, about how the two are conjoined.46 I want to leave this aside, however, in order to turn my attention to the rela- tion between the construction of Canada's Pacific Coast as a 'geological space' and the emergence of specific forms of governmental rationality or 'govern- mentality' at the end of the nineteenth century. 'Governmentality', it bears repeating, was the term used by Michel Foucault to refer to new forms of polit- ical rationality that emerged in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Prior to the sixteenth century, he argued, the problematic of 26 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) government had centred on the link between the sovereign and his principal- ity.47 By the eighteenth century, in contrast, this imperative had been in large measure replaced by another, one no longer directed at threats to the sover- eign's hold on territory, but to the internal affairs of the state. The result was the appearance of a series of new objectives for the state.48 Foucault posited several initial factors that led to this epochal shift, including the development of new administrative apparatuses, novel forms of knowledge and analysis (espe- cially statistics) and the rise of mercantalism. Demographic expansion, the increasing abundance of money and the growth of agricultural production were seen by Foucault to have provided additional impetus to the development of governmentality in the eighteenth century. Together, he argued, these led to the emergence of the problem of 'population', a problem which became visible only with the development of statistical techniques that allowed the measure- ment of aggregates of individuals or families, revealing, in turn, that popula- tions had their own regularities, rates of death and disease, cycles of scarcity, and so on.49 Accordingly and this is key the 'art of government' shifted to concern itself with how to introduce 'economy' to the workings of the state: that is, how to manage individuals, goods and wealth so as to improve the condition of the state's 'population', in a fashion similar to how the head of a family managed its affairs so as to make its fortunes prosper. In short, with the displacement of a problematic of sovereignty by a prob- lematic of 'governmentality', population or, more correctly, the improvement of its condition became an increasingly important end of government. This involved not only the integration of the 'body' and its productive capacities into systems of production, but also the micro-management of the 'species body' in terms of births and mortality, levels of health, life expectancy and longevity, and the conditions that caused these to vary. In turn, this called into existence diverse techniques directed at the management of 'life', both at the level of the individ- ual body (through orderings of space, medical and psychological exams, and so on) and at the level of the social body (in response to comprehensive mea- surements like censuses, statistical assessments, and so on).50 This transition had important consequences that bear directly on the signifi- cance of 'geology' to political rationality. As Foucault brilliantly shows, with the advent of governmentality the field and operation of power changed. Whereas before, the target of power was territory and its inhabitants, irrespective of the qualities of the territory and the condition of the inhabitants, by the eighteenth century the inverse was true. In order to attain improvement in the condition of populations, it was now necessary to govern with economy a complex of peo- ple and things: not inhabitants alone, nor territory as a bounded, but essentially empty, space, but 'men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.'.51 To the extent that these relations could be measured, and specific practices identified, Foucault argued, it became possible to devise instruments and tactics by which to compel people to use such 'things' in an improving direction. This returns us to the question of geology. As I suggested at the outset, what Producing vertical territory 27 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) is so often overlooked in discussions of governmentality defined as the 'right disposition of things' is that the new problem of 'population' (and its improve- ment) necessarily brought the state directly into contact with its territory. As sum- marized by Thom Kuehls, 'Government must take into account the subsistence of the citizenry. In doing so, it must take into consideration the climate, the resources, the waterways, the soil, the animals and plants of the territory.'52 In other words, 'good' government must articulate territory and population together, and pursue strategies to optimize the employment of 'territory with its qualities'. On the one hand, this helps us understand the emergence of geo- logical surveys in many European and North American states, initiated with the explicit purpose of enumerating the wealth and resources of the nation. The survey, by this view, involved bringing the qualities of the state's territory into the domain of political rationality, and in turn into proximity with other bod- ies of knowledge (concerning health, productivity, wealth and so on) so as to put the state's resources to their most full and profitable use. But if this is true, it is equally important to recognize that 'territory', or the state's 'nature', was not fixed and immutable. That is, it was less discovered and enumerated by such entities as the Geological Survey than continuously created as a new material- semiotic domain through the very regimes of knowledge which the GSC employed. To understand the relation between governmentality and nature as merely one of enumeration misses other histories that inform nature's legibil- ity, and, in turn, the unfolding of state rationality. Kuehls sees only one side of the equation. It is not just that the correct use of territory emerges as a press- ing issue in response to the problem of population. The reverse is also true: governing the 'right conduct' of citizens becomes a problem in ever new ways in response to nature's construction. To Foucault's concept of governmentality must be added the problem of nature's intelligibility. Geology did not simply exist 'in' a given territory. Rather, as a set of rules governing what was visible in nature, geology brought a 'terri- tory' with its 'qualities' into being, and thus opened a space simultaneously epistemological and geographical that could be incorporated into forms of political rationality. This is not an idealist argument that discourses like geology produce the world in an ontological sense; it is a much less grandiose argument that what counts as 'territory with its qualities' does not precede its construction. Much as how the territory of France was conceived in one way before Pasteur discovered the 'microbe', and in another way afterwards, the territory of the Canadian state after 'geology' would be perceived in ways altogether different from before.53 In turn, for state officials to optimize the use of these newly leg- ible spaces, social and spatial practices needed to be remade, as did citizens. Producing geological observers Geology rendered the space of the Canadian state vertical. At the end of the nineteenth century it was no longer only an extensive and primarily agricul- tural territory that required articulation with 'men', but a territory that had depth, and whose verticality could be known and represented systematically. 28 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) Links between the new visual language of geology and new forms of govern- mentality in the late nineteenth century can be traced across various sites. First, even though the discourse of geology produced new domains for political and economic calculation, this did not by itself result in the sorts of social and eco- nomic practice desired by state officials, legislators and proponents of national development. For this, it was necessary that the inhabitants of the state be remade as 'geological subjects'. That is, along with the geologization of the state's territory, the 'eyes' of its inhabitants needed to be trained to see the inner architecture of the earth. This perceived need to produce subjects who could 'read rocks' was captured wonderfully in an editorial in Victoria's British Colonist written by a future pre- mier of British Columbia, Amor de Cosmos, in 1864, seven years before the colony joined the Dominion. Every school in the colonies where boys are taught should make these branches [geol- ogy and mineralogy] part and parcel of its curriculum. Small cabinets of rocks and ores could be easily made and imported for the purpose of giving the pupils a prac- tical acquaintance with the subject matter of those sciences . . . The mountains, the hills, and the rocks of the island and the mainland would be no longer trodden over in ignorance without attention . . . Combining this acquaintance with theory they may learn from books, they would in their prospecting tours be alive to metalliferous indi- cations, and would no longer walk blindfolded, passing unconsciously material for untold wealth, as must now be often the case.54 Implied was the pressing need to produce 'governing effects' on individual con- duct. Correct vision was essential: to walk blindfolded was to limit the colony's prosperity, and, perhaps more to the point, to diminish the knowledge and devel- opment of its forces. Indeed, in Ottawa at the same time, similar efforts at gen- erating a geologically literate public were being made by the federal government. It was also in1863 that the GSC released its first systematic descrip- tion of Canada's geology east of Manitoba, a massive tome of 983 pages that included 498 illustrations and an entire atlas of maps and cross-sections. The volume described typical successions, formations and their associated fossils and minerals, and the geographical distribution of specific formations. As remarked in the Canadian Naturalist by William Dawson (George Dawson's father and prin- cipal of McGill University) the value of this work to the nation 'could scarcely be over-estimated'. To the elder Dawson, the importance of the work lay not only in what it gave to the state's attempts to oversee the development of a min- ing industry within its borders, but in its potential to shape how inhabitants saw and used the nation's lands. Here, gathered in one place, was 'a detailed account of the structure of [the] country'. In a 'reading country' like Canada, Dawson continued, this 'must bear good fruit', for, once in possession of the book, 'the practical man has all that is known of what [the] country produces in every description of mineral wealth; and has thus a reliable guide to mining enter- prise, and a protection against imposture'.55 Beyond the dissemination of knowl- edge, what was at stake was that hallmark of governmentality: the reduction of error. Indeed, as the younger Dawson would later comment, one of the chief problems that faced mining in Canada, and that stood in the way of the Producing vertical territory 29 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) government introducing 'economy' to the workings of the state, was that in the absence of adequate knowledge 'much money ha[d] been lost from time to time in injudicious enterprises'.56 Optimizing use of the nation's resources and also its labour and capital turned on seeing geologically. Five years later, in 1869, the GSC published its widely acclaimed Geological Map of Canada at a scale of 1 inch to 25 miles, and in the following years geology would be firmly installed in the nation's imagi- nation, encouraged in no small manner by the survey itself. The GSC began a comprehensive publishing programme in the 1860s, and by 1890 the GSC was sending out almost 9000 copies of its annual reports, special bulletins and maps annually. Its library, open to the public, received that same year over 2300 pub- lications. After 1875 the GSC began distributing mineral kits, guides to the geol- ogy of Canada and geological maps to the nation's schools, and GSC staff were kept busy preparing exhibits for museums across the country. Likewise, as early as the 1850s the GSC was instructed by parliament to open a museum of its own, in which the public could view minerals and learn about their distribution. The first museum, located in Montreal, illustrates the state's interest in pro- ducing geological observers. The first floor was devoted to an 'economic gallery', where visitors found displays of rocks and minerals 'as can be applied to the useful purposes for life', arranged in classes or categories and prepared so as to illustrate possible uses. Alongside these were geological maps, and sketches of 'sections' that allowed visitors to envision not only the surface of the country but its subterranean interior. To complete the pedagogical intent, scale models of mineral deposits and working mines rounded out the floor, linking geology to the development of the nation's 'forces'. The second floor was devoted to fossils, a popular topic at the time, and one that served to instil in visitors the realization that rocks were 'legible' (i.e. they could be read for the clues hid- den in them that told of their character and position in a larger structure). When the museum moved to Ottawa in 1881 it expanded its pedagogical efforts. Its collection of minerals was divided into two. A scientific collection clas- sified according to Dana's 'system of mineralogy' was located at the end of the first floor. A second, technical classification ran the length of the building on both sides. In the latter, each mineral was explained in terms of its applications, its distribution throughout the Dominion and the geological formation in which it was most commonly found. In addition, an extensive guide to the collection was published. Running down the middle of the first floor was the GSC's strati- graphical collection, which consisted of some 89000 specimens representing different geological periods. Included in this collection were specific 'series' from different regions of the country. Again, this collection was published in a guide, as was also a list of 'mining districts, areas, camps, locations and claims'.57 Individual provinces also opened museums. British Columbia, for instance, opened a museum in its old legislative buildings in 1898. Although it was small (the main legislative hall that housed the exhibit of commercial ores measured only 32 by 76 feet), the Department of Mines managed to fit 30 glass-topped wooden cabinets into the gallery, of which the lower portion of each consisted 30 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) of drawers filled with specimens available to students and others who wished to study them in more detail. A room to the side housed the Province's 'general collection' which, the Provincial Mineralogist explained, would 'prove of great value to students and prospectors as familiarizing them with the more uncom- mon minerals and which may afterwards be met with in the field'.58 Hung on the walls were geological maps and sections of the Province. Among these would have been those produced by Dawson after his many journeys along the coast and in the interior of the Province. Museums were only one site where the nation's geology was presented to its citizens. Schools, libraries, even newspapers contributed to the dissemination of geological knowledge, and represented acquaintance with the subject a public virtue. Yet, they illustrate a larger dynamic. Like the World Exhibitions in London and Paris, to which Canada sent extensive mineral collections and geo- logical maps, Canada's geological museums were not merely neutral places where individuals gazed at things, they where places were people were consti- tuted as observers. What they observed were objects arranged so as to provide the effect of an order that lay outside the spaces of the exhibition.59 Visitors to the GSC museum in Ottawa were invited to imagine the country in terms of its ver- tical structure, a structure that could be understood as an ordered whole. With properly trained eyes, the nation's public would 'no longer walk blindfolded'. Increasingly, mining would be seen as an exercise in reason, rather than spec- ulation. In this, the state had every interest. There had simply been too much hit-and-miss activity, where prospectors and land owners had been misguided by 'accidental showings' without knowing the 'fundamental configurations' of the earth.60 The result had been injurious both to individuals and the nation as a whole. Compelling proper conduct: land, law and geology In David Scott's words, governmentality is about putting in place conditions that oblige subjects in an 'improving' direction. In other words, the point of gov- ernment is to artificially so arrange things that people, following only their self- interest, do what they ought.61 In Canada, educating geological observers was not the only, nor necessarily the most effective, means through which the state encouraged its citizens to optimize use of the nation's geological resources. Achieving this end required the right disposition and use of lands.62 In the 1870s and 1880s the development of policies and legal instruments by which to regu- late the distribution and use of mineral lands became a matter of considerable debate among members of the GSC and in the parliaments and legislatures of the new nation. Before turning to attempts to articulate 'men' and 'resources', it is important to note that these efforts varied across the country, partly a result of the divi- sion of powers between federal and provincial governments in Canada. At con- federation, powers over land and resources were granted to the provinces, and the same powers were extended to British Columbia when it joined the Dominion in 1871.63 Thus, while the optimization of Canada's mineral resources Producing vertical territory 31 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) was an understandable concern of the federal government the latter had very little control over land and resource development in the provinces. This had important consequences for how 'geology', 'populations' and 'political economy' would be articulated in Canada, and introduces a note of caution against any simple equation of governmentality with what Foucault called 'knowledge of state'. It meant, for instance, that the GSC occupied a pecu- liar position. As a federal agency, it produced information for a government that had no means to influence land policy, except in areas not yet organized as provinces. Yet although the provinces controlled land policy, none had geolog- ical surveys.64 This had a number of further effects. First, it meant that in prac- tice the dissemination and utilization of knowledge produced by the GSC was more open to 'local' politics, and the vicissitudes of individual decision making, than might have been the case had Canada been a more centralized state: poli- cies and governmental practices in each province responded to regional politi- cal-economic conditions.65 Second, as part of a federal department, the GSC was to a certain degree insulated from demands that its scientific work be immedi- ately useful, allowing the GSC to carry on programmes of scientific research rel- atively independent of the vagaries of provincial politics. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that John Tyrell's journeys through the 'barren lands' of Canada's Arctic in the late 1890s would have occurred if the GSC had not understood its scientific interests to be somewhat independent of practical interests. Not all 'knowledge of state' found an application. Yet, as evident in Dawson's response to inquiries about his incomplete Vancouver Island surveys, the GSC was not entirely autonomous. Although a federal agency, it fulfilled an important role as a central knowledge-producing body, often working in the interests of, or in response to, provincial governments and local producers. In this sense, it remained responsive to provincial concerns (which often coincided with national objectives of 'development'), directing resources to the study of regions in the provinces that held out the most promise for industrial development. Likewise, in the absence of provincial surveys, provincial mining departments relied heavily on the GSC for knowledge and expertise, both in terms of geo- logical knowledge and in terms of advice for the regulation of lands and mines. Descriptions of local geological conditions found in the annual reports of the British Columbia Minister of Mines, for instance, invariably were taken from GSC reports, and the geological maps housed in the provincial department's library were almost exclusively produced by the GSC in Ottawa. In other important respects, however, links between 'knowledge of state' and 'governmentality' were more direct than this sketch of divisions of powers and responsibilities suggests. The administrative bodies overseeing mining in the provinces, for instance, were usually organized spatially and hierarchically, per- mitting the collection of information and the enforcement of policy. The gov- ernment of British Columbia divided its territory into 'mining districts', each administered by a Gold Commissioner (who reported directly to the Minister of Mines). These districts were further divided into divisions, headed by Mining Recorders, each responsible for enforcing compliance with provincial mining regulations in their area. In turn, statistics of mining production, employment, 32 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) wages, and so on, were gathered for each district and forwarded to the Minister of Mines, resulting in a more recognizably Foucauldian sense in the cen- tralization at one place of both 'knowledge of state' and 'policy'. Thus it is within a wider complex of knowledges and administrative apparatuses that efforts to com- pel individuals to optimize use of Canada's 'geological spaces' must be under- stood. The GSC, federal government and provincial administrations all played different roles, at times reinforcing the activities of the others, at other times at odds. What they shared was a concern to align the practices of individuals with new objectives of the state. With these cautions in mind, let me return to the question of geology and 'right conduct'. One of the pressing issues faced by legislators in the last decades of the nineteenth century was the reform of the nation's land laws. As explained in the pages of the GSC's Report on progress from 1885, the problem was that existing land laws designed to achieve an ordered, content and productive agricultural citizenry did not encourage the optimal use of the nation's geo- logical resources. The result, argued the GSC's mining engineer, Eugene Coste, was that mining occurred in an 'unbusiness like way', with 'immense loss to the country.' The blame for this, Coste explained, lay in the apparent want of laws and regulations for the encouragement of real mining and the development of [the country's] great mineral wealth . . . [existing] laws allow specu- lators to purchase very cheaply large tracts of 'mineral lands' which they were not compelled to work and which they hold against the interests of the mining industry and of the country, awaiting fabulous prices for them and so preventing bona fide working com- panies from developing them.66 The problem, as seen by Coste and others, lay in property systems that gave min- ing rights to surface owners and allowed the selling of mining lands to 'mere settlers' who had neither the expertise to accurately 'read' the rocks nor the capital to make the necessary investments. To know whether a 'good mine' existed, Coste explained, required a great deal of knowledge, and expensive underground exploration by shafts and levels. Even the best scientific and trained mining engineers sometimes make mistakes and every mistake costs a great deal of money. Is not then an incompetent man almost certain to make a failure of it? Who is going to do that work of testing the ground? Evidently not the settler, for if he has the misfortune to try it, he will spend every year more money on small excavations sunk in all directions, than the cultivation of his land can yield him, and he never will know how to do the work, and at what results he has arrived, if he arrives at any. The district of North Hastings (Ontario) is pierced everywhere by small excavations such as I have mentioned, sunk by settlers under their lots . . . in most of them I failed to find a trace of ore, though they represent a large amount of time and money lost, and, many farmers neglect their farms on that account.67 In Coste's somewhat immodest opinion, 'mining engineers and mining men supported by capitalists alone were able to take up these works'. The point of legal instruments, he explained, should be to place mining properties in such capable hands, rather than distributing the state's geology merely 'by accident'. Producing vertical territory 33 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) In short, in order to optimize use of the nation's 'vertical' territory, property regimes needed to include the internal architecture of the earth. Or, more to the point, the regulation of property had a new objective: to compel individu- als to do with the nation's geological resources what they ought. The first, most important step in that direction, Coste argued, was to separate surface from sub- surface rights, since this would encourage prospecting where at present it was discouraged by existing forms of private property. Moreover, with this separa- tion it would be easier to regulate mining through a series of leases and 'good legislation' that established the conditions (royalties, annual lease payments, penalties for unworked deposits, annual inspections, etc.) through which efficient mining could be encouraged.68 Equally important, in Coste's opinion, was the promotion of prospecting. Again, the current land tenure system, along with the practice of open auctions for lands designated as mineral lands by the government, were seen to be at fault for a lack of activity, since both acted as disincentives to knowledgeable prospecting (there was no guarantee that the person who did the labour of locating mineral deposits would be able to purchase them through auction and thus receive any benefit from his work). Coste's proposals had as their end the conduct of individuals. Instruments regulating land use had to be made adequate to the new reality that geology presented to the state, and needed to set in place conditions to compel indi- viduals in an improving direction: 'until the mining laws are changed and another and entirely different system adapted for the acquisition of mineral deposits,' he concluded, 'we shall have, as we have to day, but few mines work- ing.'69 Echoing his contemporaries, for whom the 'national economy' was increasingly seen as an integrated system to be efficiently managed and improved, Coste explained that upon the inauguration of new regulations, we shall see on the contrary, here and there some mines actively worked, expending vast amounts in the country, bringing workmen in, creating around them villages and towns; and every one of these mines will be more benefit to the government and to the country then thousands of granted mining locations undeveloped and not only totally useless from a mining point of view, but doing much damage to the other interests of the country and often to the speculators themselves.70 Restated in David Scott's terms, the self-interest of individuals had to be arranged so as to lead to the strengthening of the state's forces from within. As is common in Canadian federalism, Eugene Coste's programmatic state- ments did not translate into uniform policy across the Dominion's vast territory. Each province acted independently, seeking to achieve the right mix of laws and regulations so as to optimize the development of widely different resources. Moreover, there was no agreement on which instruments were most effective, or which objectives most pressing. Much of the first annual report of the Ontario Bureau of Mines, for instance, was devoted to the issue of mining legislation, and included an extensive summary and evaluation of mining legislation in juris- dictions across Canada, the United States and abroad.71 In British Columbia, mining laws were often contentious and were repeatedly changed. Rudimentary laws reserving minerals for the Crown, as well as setting out regulations 34 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) governing the conduct of miners, were set in place with the onset of the gold rush of 1857. This predated agricultural settlement, a situation unique to British Columbia that made reconfiguring land law toward mineral extraction far eas- ier than in eastern provinces. In 1859 colonial authorities strengthened these regulations, declaring that mineral lands could not be purchased, although own- ers of agricultural lands retained rights to any minerals subsequently found (except gold and silver). In the place of ownership, miners could obtain licences for 90 shillings per month.72 Over time, these licences would become a primary means for regulating mining activity and the use of British Columbia's mineral lands. In subsequent decades the tenure system for mining lands in British Columbia shifted frequently, responding to changing ideas on how best to encourage the rational development of the province's mineral resources. In 1869, for instance, licences were issued for prospectors of coal and base metals, the purchase of coal lands was permitted outright, and grants to mineral claims were now avail- able, conditional on miners fulfilling certain requirements. Provided that prospectors worked the deposits they discovered for two years, they could after this time select half an acre for purchase (at $50 per half-acre plus the cost of surveying). In an attempt to encourage immediate development, the cost of the land was waived if over $1 000 had been expended on the mine. Accordingly, provided that the miners supplied evidence of continuous work on the land for two years, outright ownership of up to 1 000 acres (at a cost of $5 per acre) could be secured by a company of men.73 Again, the cost of purchase was waived if enough had been spent on development (in this case, $10 000). In 1882, in an effort to optimize the use of all lands in the province, the government moved to retain rights to coal, silver and gold in instances where agricultural land was granted, since, as Coste would argue on the national stage three years later, farm- ers made poor stewards of mineral resources. The result was that, for a time, as many as three different forms of tenure could cover the same land (agricultural, mineral, timber). And in 1884 the laws were changed yet again, in order to close the gap between the number of mineral claims recorded and those actually worked. Before obtaining a mining grant, miners were now required to swear under oath that a vein or lode had indeed been found, prove undisputed pos- session (too many ventures were being held up by competing claims), have the land accurately surveyed and, finally, prove that $500 dollars had been expended on mining operations. At issue here is less the shifting regulations themselves than what they tell us about attempts to bring the conduct of individuals in line with changing under- standings of 'territory' and its 'qualities'. Regulations changed constantly, reflect- ing a growing knowledge of the province's resources, the opening of new mining districts, changing technological and economic conditions, competing beliefs about how best to optimize the 'forces' of the province, and efforts to articu- late 'natural resources' with the health and welfare of the province's (European) population.74 It is not just that 'mining lands' increasingly became an object of state regulation and political contestation, but that with the emergence of a dis- course of geology, new objectives came into the domain of politics: what it meant Producing vertical territory 35 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) to govern 'men and things' was no longer the same. Indeed, mining regulation continued to change. In 1898 mining claims in British Columbia were extended to include all further discoveries made in tunnels during the operation of a mine, even if these spread under neighbouring lands. And in the same year expenditures on a mining claim were reduced to only $100 a year for five years before the claim was granted outright, provided that the applicant paid a $5 fee, filed 'Form G' (affidavit of expenditures) and 'Form I' (field notes and plat). These forms were part of a growing state apparatus that oversaw and com- piled information on mining in the province. As mundane as they may seem, they formed part of a machinery of surveillance that was an indispensable component of British Columbia's land system. Regulations governing the con- duct of miners would have little purchase, after all, in the absence of records linking individuals to specific claims, and the province's various Mineral Acts set out clearly how this was to be done. Mining recorders, according to the 1896 Act, were responsible for issuing 'free miners' certificates . . . from a printed book of forms, with duplicate counterfoils, one of which counterfoils shall be filed in the office of the Mining Recorder', and were required to enter all information on mining property into a record book.75 Separate books were to record certificates, abandonments, affidavits and conveyances. The office copy of these records was to be taken as evidence in the event of disputes, and all books were open for inspection to the public. In turn, copies of these records were to be sent to the Chief Commissioner of Lands, in Victoria, so as to form a central registry. The presence of a system of surveillance, of course, does not by itself mean that its effects were extended evenly over the province. The incoming and outgoing correspondence of gold commissioners from the period contain many examples of miners pleading to have regulations waived or postponed, often successfully.76 Yet the very presence of such voluminous let- ter-books proves the point rather well; as the new century approached, the 'self- interest' of miners was increasingly defined through a web of regulations, and through instruments designed to bring the behaviour of each and all in line with them. Finally, the gathering of statistics became increasingly central to governmen- tal practices. In 1875 the British Columbia Ministry of Mines, through its min- ing recorders and gold commissioners, began collecting mining statistics for each district. In time, this included information on claims worked, population by occupation (broken down by gender and by race: white vs. Chinese), machin- ery employed, records and licences issued by class, nature of diggings, wage rates paid to white and Chinese workers, the value of gold per ounce and the total value of gold produced in the province. Additional tables in 1875 measured gold yield against miners employed and calculated average earnings per man (reach- ing back as far as such records were available, 1858). By 1903, these statistical tools had become more finely tuned, disaggregating mineral production both by type of mineral and by district (there were 10 by this time), tracking coal and coke production over time, counting employment by location (above vs. below ground), plotting the mineral production of British Columbia for various min- 36 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) erals against the production of other provinces in the Dominion, measuring exports (total and by specific destination), compiling tables of 'mining accidents' and so on. Such statistics were essential to relating 'geology', 'population' and 'economy'. They permitted the state to track trends over time, compare regional differences and locate deficiencies or inefficiencies. As explained in a remarkable passage by the director of the Ontario Bureau of Mines, this allowed the state to develop ever more precise and strategic instruments of regulation. Annual statistics of production are of the first importance, as without them, we can- not know definitely the state and progress of an industry, nor the directions in which it may be moving, nor the effect produced upon it by legislation or public policy, nor the parts of it which are weakest and most in need of help and care. Statistics are to industry what pulse and temperature are to the human body; they enable us to observe symptoms and study conditions, and in an intelligent way to suggest and apply remedies when remedies are needed.77 The analogy with the human body is telling. It was through statistics, after all, that such aggregate identities as 'industry', 'economy' and 'population' were brought into being as singular, unified 'bodies'. And, like the human body, each could be found to have regularities and cycles, norms and deviations, which could be managed through appropriate remedies. Yet the analogy is, in one important respect, misleading. For, even as it assumes an equivalence between industry and nature, it gives the impression that indus- try exists in a realm entirely autonomous from nature, which is, at best, simply the stage on which the development of industry and the state unfolds. Little wonder that Foucault and his interpreters had so little to say about 'territory with its qualities'. Yet this leaves out vast and momentous histories, including the work of geologists like Dawson. As the Director of the Bureau of Mines aptly explained in the passage immediately preceding his call for gathering statistics, regarding the inner structure of the Province, 'we now know what was not sus- pected at first'. The relationship between statistics, the emergence of something called the 'economy', and aggregate entities like 'population' (with their own cycles, rates and regularities) has been well rehearsed since the late 1970s, when Foucault outlined his arguments concerning the displacement of a problematic of sov- ereignty by a problematic of government. This new regime of governmentality involved forms of power that worked less through the sovereign's right to 'put to death or let live' and more through setting in place new and different con- ditions by which to produce 'governing effects' on conduct, or through arrang- ing things in such a way that, through certain means, particular ends could be achieved. As Foucault explained, territory with its specific qualities was essen- tial to the problematic of government. Despite the impression conveyed by Foucault, these qualities were never simply given. Indeed, it was only when the 'qualities' of the territory were rendered legible that the articulation of 'men and things' could be placed on a supposedly rational basis. In everyday governmental practices and in theoretical accounts of governmentality the Producing vertical territory 37 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) historical specificity of the regimes of vision by which the 'inert objectness' of the world was achieved recede from view. In Canada, by the turn of the century, seeing 'geologically' was no longer something novel, but had become part of how landscapes were seen, not only by capitalists and state officials but by people in many walks of life. The good government of 'men and things' increasingly assumed that the territory of the Canadian state was 'geological'. Coda: producing social natures In recent work, David Harvey argues that the production of nature is dialecti- cal and, therefore, that nature exists in an 'internal' relation with society.78 This formulation of 'social nature' follows lines first laid down by Marx and elabo- rated later by Alfred Schmidt, who claimed that Marx saw the relationship between society and nature as a metabolic interaction, centred on the labour process.79 Writing more than a decade ago, Neil Smith argued that Marx and Schmidt set the stage for a fully developed theory of the production of nature in capitalism, with radical consequences for both politics and historical analysis. Politically, Smith explained, the production of nature thesis suggested alterna- tives to the pessimism of accounts that understood societyenvironment rela- tions to be determined by natural or historical necessity (i.e. the Frankfurt School's 'domination of nature' thesis or Malthusian notions of 'natural limits'). The production of nature thesis 'implie[d] an historical future . . . still to be determined by political events and forces, not technical [or 'natural'] neces- sity.'80 Analytically, the thesis shifted attention away from efforts to 'save' exter- nal nature from humans to the examination of processes through which social natures including 'human nature' were continuously made and remade, and with what consequences. Here the analytics and politics of 'social nature' coin- cided: in order to imagine and work toward survivable futures it was necessary to understand and shape politics around those 'generative processes' which determined social productions of nature. What those 'generative processes' are is a matter of some debate. For Marxist geographers like Harvey and Smith, emphasis lies upon one dynamic above all others: uneven capitalist development. Smith, for instance, argues that the events and forces by which nature is 'produced' are 'precisely those that determine the character and structure of the capitalist mode of production'. Under dictate from the accumulation process, he continues, 'capital stalks the earth in search of natural resources . . . No part of the earth's surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.'81 More than a decade later, Harvey says much the same: 'capital circulation' he writes, 'has made the environment what it is'.82 Smith's argument was, and still is, compelling: at the end of the twentieth century it seems obvious that everywhere nature is remade in the image of the commodity from the genetic resources of tropical rain forests to the inner spaces of the human body. Yet such accounts have come under attack for their singularity. In the words of Donna Haraway, the production of nature 'is not 38 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) reducible to capitalization or commodification': it involves multiple processes that are joined and separated in numerous 'reaction sites'.83 This paper has sought to extend what counts as 'production' in order to account for a wider field of heterogenous practices that generate social natures. Arguably, the end of the nineteenth century witnessed the acceleration of nature's commodifica- tion (extensively and intensively). Yet, this occurred in conjunction with forms of scientific and governmental rationality. The 'economic', 'discursive' and 'political' did not constitute autonomous realms. To assume that nature simply lies 'ready at hand' leaves the temporalities and spatialities of knowing nature unthought. Smith clearly recognized this, as evident in his comments on Alfred Schmidt: The appropriation of knowledge is equally a part of this metabolism between human beings and nature. Thus, Schmidt insists that for 'the materialist Marx . . . nature and its laws subsist independently of all human consciousness and will' but that such laws can only be formulated 'with the help of social categories. The concept of a law of nature is unthinkable without men's endeavors to master nature.'84 Elsewhere, Smith explains that science constitutes a social institution 'with a life and logic of its own'. Yet he does not take this as far as he might, settling for the familiar story of how, after Francis Bacon, modern science shared with cap- italism the externalization of nature. That capitalism and post-Enlightenment science shared an ideology of nature is today widely recognized, but this provides little help in exploring specific pro- ductions of nature. One could say, with Latour, that this is to not be materialist enough! How nature was made and remade in the late nineteenth century had to do not simply with nature's 'externalization', but with specific intersections of power/knowledge and governmentality. This was true both in terms of the 'external' nature of the nation whose emerging qualities were to be organized and optimized as part of a larger 'political economy' and in terms of the 'inner nature' of human subjects (remade, for instance, as diligent and disciplined 'observers'). Science, governmentality and capitalist production comprised dif- ferent, interwoven threads of nature's production. The ensuing picture of social nature is perhaps closer to Deleuze and Guattari's 'assemblages', Latour's 'networks of quasi-objects' and Haraway's 'cyborgs', where nature has an ontology immanent in the practices by which it is continuously reconstituted, but where these practices are seen as irreducibly multiple. Crucially, politics is also reconfigured. As expressed by Latour, the pressing task is not, finally, to take into account everything, but to Creat[e] the procedures that make it possible to follow a network of quasi-objects whose relations of subordination remain uncertain and which thus require a new form of political activity adapted to following them.85 More modest than grand narratives of nature's revolutionary transformation, Latour's proposal for new forms of politics paradoxically may bring much more into view. As I have endeavoured to show, it was not only physical geography that was reconfigured in late nineteenth-century networks of science, govern- ment and capital, but the contours and power of the state, the paths and inten- Producing vertical territory 39 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) sities of capitalist development, the vision and conduct of citizens and, not least, the territory of the state and its qualities. These were tangled together in knots of intertwined practices and objects. And, with the emergence of a 'vertical' nature, none remained unchanged. Acknowledgements Research for this paper was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship. Mark Lindberg provided cartographic assistance. I would also like to thank David Demeritt, Scott Kirsch, Jake Kosek, Don Mitchell, Donald Moore, Anand Pandian, Hugh Raffles and an additional anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts. None is responsible for the paper's shortcomings. Department of Geography University of Minnesota Notes 1 M. Foucault, 'Governmentality', in G. Burchell et al., eds, The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 93. 2 It is common today to refer to these islands as Haida Gwaii, the name used by the Haida people. I retain the colonial appellation intentionally, underlining the role that naming played in colonial rule and, later, in legitimating the sovereign claims of the Canadian state. 3 For a comprehensive history of the Geological Survey of Canada, see M. Zaslow, Reading the rocks: the story of the Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa, Macmillan, 1975). Also S. Zeller, Inventing Canada: early Victorian science and the idea of the transcontinen- tal nation (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987). 4 Initially, the GSC's mandate extended far beyond geology. Dawson's reports often included discussion of the general features of the landscape, rivers, climate, flora, fauna, marine life and descriptions of aboriginal communities and cultures. 5 R. C. Harris, The resettlement of British Columbia: essays on colonialism and geographical change (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1997). 6 See L. Winslow-Spragge, No ordinary man: George Mercer Dawson (Toronto, Natural Heritage, 1993). For Dawson, travel was complicated by his struggles with Pott's dis- ease (tuberculosis of the spine), a physical condition which caused his vertebrae to soften and collapse and his spine to twist and curve. 7 Foucault, 'Governmentality'; M. Foucault, 'Security, territory and population', in P. Rabinow, ed., Michel Foucault: ethics, subjectivity and truth (New York, New Press, 1997), pp. 6772; 'The birth of biopolitics' ibid., pp. 7380; and The history of sexuality: an introduction (1978) (London, Penguin, 1990). 8 See Burchell et al., The Foucault effect. It is important to refrain from universalizing such forms of state rationality. While Foucault's concept of governmentality is applic- able to colonial contexts, and helps explain how Europe's colonial projects were orga- nized, it is equally important to recognize the concurrent presence of multiple modernities which cannot be conflated with a European norm. On governmentality and colonialism, see D. Scott, 'Colonial governmentality', Social Text, 42 (1995), pp. 191220. 9 T. Kuelhs, Beyond sovereign territory (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 40 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) 10 K. Sivaramakrishnan, 'A limited forest conservancy in southwest Bengal, 18641912', Journal of Asian Studies, 56 (1997), pp. 75112. See also Kuehls, Sovereign territory. 11 A similar problem is found in J. Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1997). Scott characterizes the modern state's relation to nature as consisting of practices of 'legi- bility' and 'simplification' by which state officials sought to rationalize and standard- ize nature (German scientific forestry stands as Scott's primary example). This administrative ordering of the environment, Scott suggests, results in an abstract nature, and instils into the modern state a peculiar ecological logic that sets it apart from earlier social and political formations. I diverge from Scott's approach in two ways. First, he depends on a stark division between 'state' and 'civil society' in which the state is seen as an autonomous, intentional actor that pre-exists vis-à-vis the prac- tices through which its territory is rendered visible and available to forms of political calculation. In contrast, I suggest that the state and state power does not prefig- ure nature's 'simplification' so much as emerge concurrently with, and in a dialecti- cal relation to, forms of knowledge like scientific forestry and geology. Second, I suggest that a more complex field of social practices comes into view if one rejects Scott's unidirectional, and somewhat totalizing, account. Rather than begin with the state as prior to nature's rationalization, it may be more useful and historically accu- rate to show how the specific knowledges that informed state rationality emerged from a much wider web of social and political practices (including those of the state), which over time set in place the epistemological conditions necessary for the state to act strategically on nature. 12 For an account that attends to the historical practices mapping, surveying, and so on through which the spatial outlines of states, their 'interiors', and forms of state sovereignty, come to be consolidated, see T. Winichakul, Siam mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994). 13 Arguably, Foucault's inattention to nature in his studies on governmentality stems from an attitude to the physical sciences was not fully consistent with his analysis of power/knowledge in the social sciences: P. Rutherford, 'The entry of life into his- tory', in E. Darier, ed., Discourses of the environment (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), pp. 3762. 14 N. Smith, Uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990); D. Harvey, Justice, nature and the geography of difference (London, Blackwell, 1996). 15 See D. Haraway, Modest_witness@second_millennium.Female man©_meets_OncomouseTM (New York, Routledge, 1997). 16 On 'territorialization' as social and political control, see P. Vandergeest and N. Peluso, 'Territorialization and state power in Thailand', Theory and Practice 24 (1995, pp. 385426. 17 M. Heidegger, Being and time (New York, Harper, 1962). 18 I borrow the notion of 'legibility' from J. Butler, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of 'sex' (New York, Routledge, 1993). 19 In his ethnological work Dawson paid much greater attention to the Haida, but these studies remained independent from his geological studies. I examine Dawson's 'dou- ble vision' and its consequences for struggles over land and resources in British Columbia in B. Willems-Braun, 'Buried epistemologies: the politics of nature in (post)colonial British Columbia', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997), pp. 331. 20 The impression that Dawson simply recorded what was present in nature is reinforced Producing vertical territory 41 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) by the work of historians who see in the GSC the progressive unfolding of an ever closer and more accurate acquaintance with the land (cf. Zaslow, Reading the rocks). In these accounts Dawson's work is evaluated for its 'accuracy', measured in terms of the state of knowledge today. To say that knowledge is 'socially constructed' is not the same as the relativist position that all and any knowledges are possible or equally valid. See D. Demeritt, 'Science, social constructivism and nature', in B. Braun and N. Castree, eds, Remaking reality: nature at the millennium (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 17393. 21 This stands in marked contrast to the description of these same forests as 'monu- mental', 'enchanting' or 'cathedral-like' by environmentalists in the 1990s. 22 B. Latour, 'Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands', Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986), p. 3. Arguably, Latour's emphasis on practice has much in common with historical materialist modes of inquiry. Yet, Latour explicitly rejects those Marxian accounts of scientific knowledge that begin with shifts in the economy and see scientific knowledge as reflecting these: 'The net result of this strategy is that nothing is empirically verifiable since there is a yawning gap between general economic trends and the fine details of cognitive inno- vations. Worst of all, in order to explain science we have to kneel before one specific science, that of economics. So, ironically, many 'materialist' accounts of the emer- gence of science are in no way material since they ignore the precise practice and craftmanship of knowing and hide from scrutiny the omniscient economic historian' (p. 3). Latour finds explanations at the scale of 'mind' or 'economy' to be equally ideal- ist. In contrast, he outlines a project that 'deflates grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies and replaces them by [attention to] simple modifications in the way in which groups of people argue with one another using paper, signs, prints and dia- grams' (p. 3). This does not mean that 'economic interests' are unimportant, only that one cannot make sense of the production of knowledge on this plane alone. 'Commercial interests, capitalist spirit, imperialism, thirst for knowledge, are empty terms as long as one does not take into account Mercator's projection, marine clocks and their markers, copper engraving of maps, rutters, the keeping of 'log books', and the many printed editions of Cook's voyages that La Pérouse carries with him . . . on the other hand, no innovation in the way longitude and latitidues are calculated, clocks are built, log books are compiled, copper plates are printed, would make any difference whatsoever if they did not help to muster, align, and win over new and unexpected allies . . . To maintain only the second line of argument would offer a mystical view of the powers provided by semiotic material . . . to maintain only the first would be to offer an idealist explanation (even if clad in materialist clothes)' (p. 6). 23 For accounts that locate the rise of geology in the Industrial Revolution, see M. Guntau, 'The emergence of geology as a scientific discipline', History of Science 16 (1978), pp. 28090; R. Porter, 'The industrial revolution and the rise of the science of geology', in M. Teich and R. Young, eds, Changing perspectives in the history of science (London, Heinemann Educational, 1973). 24 D. Turnbull, 'Reframing science and other local knowledge traditions', Futures, 29 (1997), pp. 551562. See also D. Livingstone, 'The spaces of knowledge: contributions towards a historical geography of science', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995), pp. 534. 25 While this 'vision' was decidedly European in terms of its development and strategic deployment, it cannot be understood as arising 'internal' to Europe. The cycles of 42 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) accumulation that underlay its emergence were global in reach and involved many non-European actors. 26 A number of studies that employ Latour's notion of 'cycles of accumulation' can be found in D. Miller and P. Reill, eds, Visions of empire: voyages, botany and representations of nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). 27 Latour's approach is highly suggestive for how and why imperialism was so effective. The re-creation in Europe of information about non-European lands and peoples proved a particularly effective solution to the problem of 'how to be familiar with things, people and events which are distant'. By bringing the 'world' into the space of the museum, archive or colonial office, individual observations could be combined into general knowledges, allowing European explorers, traders and administrators to return to specific sites in a position of relative strength. B. Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 330; B. Cohen, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996); T. Richards, The imperial archive: knowledge and the fantasy of empire (New York, Verso, 1993). 28 There is a vast wealth of writings on the history of geology, and in particular on the shift from 'mineralogy' to 'geology' that occurred between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Although none explicitly use Latour's concepts, a number either deliberately or inadvertently draw attention to the significance of 'inscriptions' and the practice of gathering these at 'centres of accumulation'. My brief sketch of the history of geology draws largely on the following: M. Rudwick, 'The emergence of a visual language for geo- logical science, 17601840', History of Science 14 (1976), pp. 14995; 'Minerals, strata and fossils', in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary, eds, Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 26686; R. Landau, From miner- alogy to geology: the foundations of a science, 16501830 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987); J. Secord, Controversy in Victorian geology: the CambrianSilurian dispute (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1986); M. Guntau, 'The natural history of the earth', in Jardine et al., Cultures of natural history, pp. 21129; R. Porter, The mak- ing of geology: earth science in Britain, 16601815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1977); D. Stoddart, 'Darwin and the seeing eye: iconography and meaning in the beagle years', Earth Sciences History 14 (1995) 322; and R. Stafford, 'Annexing the landscapes of the past: British imperial geology in the nineteenth century', in J. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the natural world (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 6789. 29 Jardine et al., Cultures of natural history; Miller and Reill, Visions of empire. 30 Although Latour directs our focus to what people do in the practice of (imperial) sci- ence, his accounts tend to discuss the actions of Europeans alone. Dawson's travels to the Queen Charlottes depended significantly on the labour and skill of the Haida, who aided Dawson with knowledge, directions and supplies at every step of the way. For attempts to integrate the agency of non-European actors and networks, see H. Raffles, On the nature of the Amazon (Princeton, NJ, University of Princeton Press, forth- coming); Turbull, 'Reframing science'; and H. Watson-Verran and D. Turnbull, 'Science and other indigenous knowledge systems', in S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen and T. Pinch, eds, Handbook of science and technology studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 1995). 31 Cf. Foucault's discussion of things becoming 'synoptically present': M. Foucault, The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception (London, Pantheon, 1973). 32 Rudwick, 'Minerals, strata and fossils'. External appearance was not alone the basis Producing vertical territory 43 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) for classification; through chemical analysis the 'inner nature' of specimens was also examined. 33 Ibid. 34 This is illustrated well in Stoddart, 'Darwin'. 35 Rudwick, 'Minerals, strata and fossils'; Laudan, From mineralogy to geology. 36 P. Rabinow, 'Artificiality and enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality', in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds, Incorporations (New York, Zone, 1992), p. 236. 37 G. Dawson, 'Notes on the glaciation of British Columbia', Canadian Naturalist 9 (1881), pp. 18. 38 Latour, 'Visualization', p. 15. Rudwick develops the notion of 'optical consistency' in 'The emergence of a visual language'. 39 G. M. Dawson, 'General note on the mines and minerals of economic value of British Columbia', Report of progress, GSC, 18767 (Montreal, Geological Survey of Canada, 1877), pp. 17, 1819. 40 My phrasing deliberately echoes Neil Smith's contention that 'capital stalks the earth in search of natural resources . . . No part of the earth's surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital': Uneven development, pp. 49, 56. 41 J. Murray, 'Exposing Canada's underground: one hundred and fifty years of geologi- cal survey', The Archivist 19 (1992), pp. 25. 42 Statements like these were patently self-serving. For industrialists they served to pres- sure the state to partly underwrite the risk of investment by producing knowledge that could be used for private gain. For provincial and federal departments of mines, it justified the rapid expansion of their bureaucracies. The passage quoted is taken from the Annual report of the British Columbia Minister of Mines (Victoria, 1883). 43 Ibid., p. 648. 44 These statements are found in two letters to Ms Rosalind Watson, dated 27 Apr. 1897 and 4 Nov. 1899 (Provincial Archives of British Columbia). 45 See Braun and Castree, Remaking reality. 46 Latour usefully summarizes this intertwining of different 'fields of action' within a sin- gle frame: 'There is not a history of engineers, then a history of capitalists, then one of scientists, then one of mathematicians, then one of economists. Rather there is a single history of these centres of calculation. It is not only because they look exclu- sively at maps, account books, drawings, legal texts and files, that cartographers, mer- chants, engineers, jurists and civil servants get the edge on all the others. It is because all these inscriptions can be superimposed, reshuffled, recombined, and summarized, and that totally new phenomena emerge, hidden from the other people from whom all these inscriptions have been exacted' ('Visualization', p. 32). 47 In Machiavelli's The prince, for instance, the sovereign was seen to stand in a relation of singularity and externality to his principality, where the link between prince and principality was purely synthetic (i.e. it had no essential or natural juridical connec- tion). Since this link was fragile and continually under threat, the objective of the exercise of power was to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality. In other words, political reason revolved around the prince's ability to 'keep' his principality. 48 Foucault, 'Security, territory and population', p. 67. 49 Foucault, 'Governmentality', p. 99. 50 This coincided with what Foucault described as a new regime of 'bio-power' that, rather than dedicated to impeding individuals, making them submit or destroying them, was bent on generating forces, making them grow and ordering them. 'Bio- power', Foucault explained, took two related forms. The first centred on the 'body- 44 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) as-machine' and involved disciplining the body and its movements so as to optimize its capacities. The second had as its site of application 'population', and involved the regulation of people and what Foucault described as the 'calculated management of life': Foucault, History of sexuality. 51 Foucault, 'Governmentality', p. 93. 52 Kuehls, Sovereign territory, p. 67. 53 B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. A. Sheridan and J. Law (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988). 54 A. de Cosmos, 'Diffusion of geological knowledge', British Colonist (Victoria), 27 June 1864, p. 2. 55 W. Dawson, 'Review of Geology of Canada', Canadian Naturalist and Geologist n.s. 1 (1863), pp. 6667. 56 Dawson, 'General note', p. 29. 57 See G. C. Hoffmann, Catalogue of section one of the museum of the Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa, Geological Survey of Canada, 1893). 58 Annual report of the Minister of Mines (Victoria, 1898), p. 973. 59 See T. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989). 60 I borrow the phrases from Zaslov, Reading the rocks. 61 Scott, 'Colonial governmentality'. 62 Robert Cail argues that beginning with the policies of the first governor on the colony of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, the colony's and later the Province's land acts 'tried to make it impossible for land to be taken except for beneficial purposes': Land, man, and the law (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1974), p. xiii. 63 The vast Northwest Territories (NWT, today divided between Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Yukon and Northwest Territories) remained under federal juris- diction. 64 Mining lands in the NWT were regulated by the Northwest Territories Act of 1889. As outlined in the Act, the declaration of 'mining districts' in the territories was to be based in large measure on GSC surveys: G. Wyman, Public lands and mining laws of Alaska, the Northwest Territory and the Province of British Columbia (Fruitvale, CA, 1898). 65 This can be traced in parliamentary debates and in the annual reports of ministers responsible for lands and mines in each province. 66 E. Coste, 'Observations on mining laws and mining in Canada, with suggestions for the better development of the mineral resources of the Dominion', in Geological Survey of Canada, Annual report, 1885 (Ottawa, 1886), app. K, pp. 56 (emphasis added). 67 Ibid., p. 11. 68 To this end Coste recommended that limits be placed on the size of mining tracts, since it was believed that too many small claims stood in the way of acquisition of large mines by 'good companies' that would be able to develop the resources prop- erly. On the other hand, if mining properties were too vast, Coste worried that large areas of the deposit would remain undeveloped. What was required was legislation that resulted in the optimum size of landholding in so-called 'geological' districts. 69 Coste, 'Observations on mining laws', pp. 910. 70 Ibid., p. 13. 71 Ontario Minister of Mines, Report of the Bureau of Mines (Toronto, Government of Ontario, 1891). 72 Cail, Land, p. 71. Most mines at this time were placer mines. 73 The company had to consist of at least 10 men. 74 At various points laws were enacted to regulate the racial composition of the work- Producing vertical territory 45 Ecumene 2000 7 (1) force in British Columbia's mines, with Chinese miners the most frequent target. 75 British Columbia Mineral Act, 1896, quoted in Wyman, Public lands, p. 307. 76 A remarkable collection of this correspondence is held in the Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, BC. 77 Province of Ontario, Report of the Bureau of Mines (Toronto, Ontario Bureau of Mines, 1891), p. 5. 78 Harvey, Justice, nature and the geography of difference. See also Smith, Uneven development; N. Castree, 'The nature of produced nature: materiality and knowledge construction in Marxism', Antipode 27 (1995), pp. 1228; N. Castree and B. Braun, 'The construc- tion of nature and the nature of construction: analytical and political tools for build- ing survivable futures', in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality, pp. 342. 79 A. Schmidt, The concept of nature in Marx (London, New Left Books, 1971). 80 Smith, Uneven development, p. 31. 81 Ibid., pp. 31, 49, 56. 82 D. Harvey, Justice, nature and the geography of difference, p. 131. 83 Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 141. 84 Smith, Uneven development, p. 20. Smith is quoting Schmidt, The concept of nature, p. 70. 85 B. Latour, 'To modernize or ecologise? That is the question', in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality, p. 235. 46 Bruce Braun Ecumene 2000 7 (1) 1 M. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell et al. , eds, The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 93. 2 It is common today to refer to these islands as Haida Gwaii, the name used by the Haida people. I retain the colonial appellation intentionally, underlining the role that naming played in colonial rule and, later, in legitimating the sovereign claims of the Canadian state. 3 For a comprehensive history of the Geological Survey of Canada, see M. Zaslow, Reading the rocks: the story of the Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa, Macmillan, 1975). Also S. Zeller, Inventing Canada: early Victorian science and the idea of the transcontinental nation (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987). 4 Initially, the GSC’s mandate extended far beyond geology. Dawson’s reports often included discussion of the general features of the landscape, rivers, climate, flora, fauna, marine life and descriptions of aboriginal communities and cultures. 5 R. C. Harris, The resettlement of British Columbia: essays on colonialism and geographical change (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1997). 6 See L. Winslow-Spragge, No ordinary man: George Mercer Dawson (Toronto, Natural Heritage, 1993). For Dawson, travel was complicated by his struggles with Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the spine), a physical condition which caused his vertebrae to soften and collapse and his spine to twist and curve. 7 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’; M. Foucault, ‘Security, territory and population’, in P. Rabinow, ed., Michel Foucault: ethics, subjectivity and truth (New York, New Press, 1997), pp. 67-72; ‘The birth of biopolitics’ Ibid. , pp. 73-80; and The history of sexuality: an introduction (1978) (London, Penguin, 1990). 8 See Burchell et al. , The Foucault effect . It is important to refrain from universalizing such forms of state rationality. While Foucault’s concept of governmentality is applicable to colonial contexts, and helps explain how Europe’s colonial projects were organized, it is equally important to recognize the concurrent presence of multiple modernities which cannot be conflated with a European norm. On governmentality and colonialism, see D. Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’, Social Text , 42 (1995), pp. 191-220. 9 T. Kuelhs, Beyond sovereign territory (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 10 K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘A limited forest conservancy in southwest Bengal, 1864-1912’, Journal of Asian Studies , 56 (1997), pp. 75-112. See also Kuehls, Sovereign territory . 11 A similar problem is found in J. Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1997). Scott characterizes the modern state’s relation to nature as consisting of practices of ‘legibility’ and ‘simplification’ by which state officials sought to rationalize and standardize nature (German scientific forestry stands as Scott’s primary example). This administrative ordering of the environment, Scott suggests, results in an abstract nature, and instils into the modern state a peculiar ecological logic that sets it apart from earlier social and political formations. I diverge from Scott’s approach in two ways. First, he depends on a stark division between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ in which the state is seen as an autonomous, intentional actor that pre-exists vis-à-vis the practices through which its territory is rendered visible and available to forms of political calculation. In contrast, I suggest that the state - and state power - does not prefigure nature’s ‘simplification’ so much as emerge concurrently with, and in a dialectical relation to, forms of knowledge like scientific forestry and geology. Second, I suggest that a more complex field of social practices comes into view if one rejects Scott’s unidirectional, and somewhat totalizing, account. Rather than begin with the state as prior to nature’s rationalization, it may be more useful - and historically accurate - to show how the specific knowledges that informed state rationality emerged from a much wider web of social and political practices (including those of the state), which over time set in place the epistemological conditions necessary for the state to act strategically on nature. 12 For an account that attends to the historical practices - mapping, surveying, and so on - through which the spatial outlines of states, their ‘interiors’, and forms of state sovereignty, come to be consolidated, see T. Winichakul, Siam mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994). 13 Arguably, Foucault’s inattention to nature in his studies on governmentality stems from an attitude to the physical sciences was not fully consistent with his analysis of power/knowledge in the social sciences: P. Rutherford, ‘The entry of life into history’, in E. Darier, ed., Discourses of the environment (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), pp. 37-62. 14 N. Smith, Uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990); D. Harvey, Justice, nature and the geography of difference (London, Blackwell, 1996). 15 See D. Haraway, Modest_witness@second_millennium.Female man©_meets_Oncomouse™ (New York, Routledge, 1997). 16 On ‘territorialization’ as social and political control, see P. Vandergeest and N. Peluso, ‘Territorialization and state power in Thailand’, Theory and Practice 24 (1995, pp. 385-426. 17 M. Heidegger, Being and time (New York, Harper, 1962). 18 I borrow the notion of ‘legibility’ from J. Butler, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’ (New York, Routledge, 1993). 19 In his ethnological work Dawson paid much greater attention to the Haida, but these studies remained independent from his geological studies. I examine Dawson’s ‘double vision’ and its consequences for struggles over land and resources in British Columbia in B. Willems-Braun, ‘Buried epistemologies: the politics of nature in (post)colonial British Columbia’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997), pp. 3-31. 20 The impression that Dawson simply recorded what was present in nature is reinforced by the work of historians who see in the GSC the progressive unfolding of an ever closer and more accurate acquaintance with the land (cf. Zaslow, Reading the rocks ). In these accounts Dawson’s work is evaluated for its ‘accuracy’, measured in terms of the state of knowledge today. To say that knowledge is ‘socially constructed’ is not the same as the relativist position that all and any knowledges are possible or equally valid. See D. Demeritt, ‘Science, social constructivism and nature’, in B. Braun and N. Castree, eds, Remaking reality: nature at the millennium (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 173-93. 21 This stands in marked contrast to the description of these same forests as ‘monu-mental’, ‘enchanting’ or ‘cathedral-like’ by environmentalists in the 1990s. 22 B. Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986), p. 3. Arguably, Latour’s emphasis on practice has much in common with historical materialist modes of inquiry. Yet, Latour explicitly rejects those Marxian accounts of scientific knowledge that begin with shifts in the economy and see scientific knowledge as reflecting these: ‘The net result of this strategy is that nothing is empirically verifiable since there is a yawning gap between general economic trends and the fine details of cognitive innovations. Worst of all, in order to explain science we have to kneel before one specific science, that of economics. So, ironically, many ‘materialist’ accounts of the emergence of science are in no way material since they ignore the precise practice and craftmanship of knowing and hide from scrutiny the omniscient economic historian’ (p. 3). Latour finds explanations at the scale of ‘mind’ or ‘economy’ to be equally idealist. In contrast, he outlines a project that ‘deflates grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies and replaces them by [attention to] simple modifications in the way in which groups of people argue with one another using paper, signs, prints and diagrams’ (p. 3). This does not mean that ‘economic interests’ are unimportant, only that one cannot make sense of the production of knowledge on this plane alone. ‘Commercial interests, capitalist spirit, imperialism, thirst for knowledge, are empty terms as long as one does not take into account Mercator’s projection, marine clocks and their markers, copper engraving of maps, rutters, the keeping of ‘log books’, and the many printed editions of Cook’s voyages that La Pérouse carries with him... on the other hand, no innovation in the way longitude and latitidues are calculated, clocks are built, log books are compiled, copper plates are printed, would make any difference whatsoever if they did not help to muster, align, and win over new and unexpected allies... To maintain only the second line of argument would offer a mystical view of the powers provided by semiotic material... to maintain only the first would be to offer an idealist explanation (even if clad in materialist clothes)’ (p. 6). 23 For accounts that locate the rise of geology in the Industrial Revolution, see M. Guntau, ‘The emergence of geology as a scientific discipline’, History of Science 16 (1978), pp. 280-90; R. Porter, ‘The industrial revolution and the rise of the science of geology’, in M. Teich and R. Young, eds, Changing perspectives in the history of science (London, Heinemann Educational, 1973). 24 D. Turnbull, ‘Reframing science and other local knowledge traditions’, Futures , 29 (1997), pp. 551-562. See also D. Livingstone, ‘The spaces of knowledge: contributions towards a historical geography of science’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995), pp. 5-34. 25 While this ‘vision’ was decidedly European in terms of its development and strategic deployment, it cannot be understood as arising ‘internal’ to Europe. The cycles of accumulation that underlay its emergence were global in reach and involved many non-European actors. 26 A number of studies that employ Latour’s notion of ‘cycles of accumulation’ can be found in D. Miller and P. Reill, eds, Visions of empire: voyages, botany and representations of nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). 27 Latour’s approach is highly suggestive for how and why imperialism was so effective. The re-creation in Europe of information about non-European lands and peoples proved a particularly effective solution to the problem of ‘how to be familiar with things, people and events which are distant’. By bringing the ‘world’ into the space of the museum, archive or colonial office, individual observations could be combined into general knowledges, allowing European explorers, traders and administrators to return to specific sites in a position of relative strength. B. Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 330; B. Cohen, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996); T. Richards, The imperial archive: knowledge and the fantasy of empire (New York, Verso, 1993). 28 There is a vast wealth of writings on the history of geology, and in particular on the shift from ‘mineralogy’ to ‘geology’ that occurred between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Although none explicitly use Latour’s concepts, a number -either deliberately or inadvertently -draw attention to the significance of ‘inscriptions’ and the practice of gathering these at ‘centres of accumulation’. My brief sketch of the history of geology draws largely on the following: M. Rudwick, ‘The emergence of a visual language for geological science, 1760-1840’, History of Science 14 (1976), pp. 149-95; ‘Minerals, strata and fossils’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary, eds, Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 266-86; R. Landau, From miner-alogy to geology: the foundations of a science, 1650-1830 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987); J. Secord, Controversy in Victorian geology: the Cambrian-Silurian dispute (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1986); M. Guntau, ‘The natural history of the earth’, in Jardine et al. , Cultures of natural history , pp. 211-29; R. Porter, The making of geology: earth science in Britain, 1660-1815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1977); D. Stoddart, ‘Darwin and the seeing eye: iconography and meaning in the beagle years’, Earth Sciences History 14 (1995) 3-22; and R. Stafford, ‘Annexing the landscapes of the past: British imperial geology in the nineteenth century’, in J. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the natural world (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 67-89. 29 Jardine et al. , Cultures of natural history ; Miller and Reill, Visions of empire . 30 Although Latour directs our focus to what people do in the practice of (imperial) science, his accounts tend to discuss the actions of Europeans alone. Dawson’s travels to the Queen Charlottes depended significantly on the labour and skill of the Haida, who aided Dawson with knowledge, directions and supplies at every step of the way. For attempts to integrate the agency of non-European actors and networks, see H. Raffles, On the nature of the Amazon (Princeton, NJ, University of Princeton Press, forthcoming); Turbull, ‘Reframing science’; and H. Watson-Verran and D. Turnbull, ‘Science and other indigenous knowledge systems’, in S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen and T. Pinch, eds, Handbook of science and technology studies (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 1995). 31 Cf. Foucault’s discussion of things becoming ‘synoptically present’: M. Foucault, The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception (London, Pantheon, 1973). 32 Rudwick, ‘Minerals, strata and fossils’. External appearance was not alone the basis for classification; through chemical analysis the ‘inner nature’ of specimens was also examined. 33 Ibid. 34 This is illustrated well in Stoddart, ‘Darwin’. 35 Rudwick, ‘Minerals, strata and fossils’; Laudan, From mineralogy to geology . 36 P. Rabinow, ‘Artificiality and enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds, Incorporations (New York, Zone, 1992), p. 236. 37 G. Dawson, ‘Notes on the glaciation of British Columbia’, Canadian Naturalist 9 (1881), pp. 1-8. 38 Latour, ‘Visualization’, p. 15. Rudwick develops the notion of ‘optical consistency’ in ‘The emergence of a visual language’. 39 G. M. Dawson, ‘General note on the mines and minerals of economic value of British Columbia’, Report of progress, GSC, 1876-7 (Montreal, Geological Survey of Canada, 1877), pp. 17, 18-19. 40 My phrasing deliberately echoes Neil Smith’s contention that ‘capital stalks the earth in search of natural resources... No part of the earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital’: Uneven development , pp. 49, 56. 41 J. Murray, ‘Exposing Canada’s underground: one hundred and fifty years of geological survey’, The Archivist 19 (1992), pp. 2-5. 42 Statements like these were patently self-serving. For industrialists they served to pressure the state to partly underwrite the risk of investment by producing knowledge that could be used for private gain. For provincial and federal departments of mines, it justified the rapid expansion of their bureaucracies. The passage quoted is taken from the Annual report of the British Columbia Minister of Mines (Victoria, 1883). 43 Ibid. , p. 648. 44 These statements are found in two letters to Ms Rosalind Watson, dated 27 Apr. 1897 and 4 Nov. 1899 (Provincial Archives of British Columbia). 45 See Braun and Castree, Remaking reality . 46 Latour usefully summarizes this intertwining of different ‘fields of action’ within a single frame: ‘There is not a history of engineers, then a history of capitalists, then one of scientists, then one of mathematicians, then one of economists. Rather there is a single history of these centres of calculation. It is not only because they look exclusively at maps, account books, drawings, legal texts and files, that cartographers, merchants, engineers, jurists and civil servants get the edge on all the others. It is because all these inscriptions can be superimposed, reshuffled, recombined, and summarized, and that totally new phenomena emerge, hidden from the other people from whom all these inscriptions have been exacted’ (‘Visualization’, p. 32). 47 In Machiavelli’s The prince , for instance, the sovereign was seen to stand in a relation of singularity and externality to his principality, where the link between prince and principality was purely synthetic (i.e. it had no essential or natural juridical connection). Since this link was fragile and continually under threat, the objective of the exercise of power was to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality. In other words, political reason revolved around the prince’s ability to ‘keep’ his principality. 48 Foucault, ‘Security, territory and population’, p. 67. 49 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, p. 99. 50 This coincided with what Foucault described as a new regime of ‘bio-power’ that, rather than dedicated to impeding individuals, making them submit or destroying them, was bent on generating forces , making them grow and ordering them. ‘Bio-power’, Foucault explained, took two related forms. The first centred on the ‘bodyas-machine’ and involved disciplining the body and its movements so as to optimize its capacities. The second had as its site of application ‘population’, and involved the regulation of people and what Foucault described as the ‘calculated management of life’: Foucault, History of sexuality . 51 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, p. 93. 52 Kuehls, Sovereign territory , p. 67. 53 B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France , trans. A. Sheridan and J. Law (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988). 54 A. de Cosmos, ‘Diffusion of geological knowledge’, British Colonist (Victoria), 27 June 1864, p. 2. 55 W. Dawson, ‘Review of Geology of Canada ’, Canadian Naturalist and Geologist n.s. 1 (1863), pp. 66-67. 56 Dawson, ‘General note’, p. 29. 57 See G. C. Hoffmann, Catalogue of section one of the museum of the Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa, Geological Survey of Canada, 1893). 58 Annual report of the Minister of Mines (Victoria, 1898), p. 973. 59 See T. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989). 60 I borrow the phrases from Zaslov, Reading the rocks . 61 Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’. 62 Robert Cail argues that beginning with the policies of the first governor on the colony of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, the colony’s - and later the Province’s - land acts ‘tried to make it impossible for land to be taken except for beneficial purposes’: Land, man, and the law (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1974), p. xiii. 63 The vast Northwest Territories (NWT, today divided between Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Yukon and Northwest Territories) remained under federal jurisdiction. 64 Mining lands in the NWT were regulated by the Northwest Territories Act of 1889. As outlined in the Act, the declaration of ‘mining districts’ in the territories was to be based in large measure on GSC surveys: G. Wyman, Public lands and mining laws of Alaska, the Northwest Territory and the Province of British Columbia (Fruitvale, CA, 1898). 65 This can be traced in parliamentary debates and in the annual reports of ministers responsible for lands and mines in each province. 66 E. Coste, ‘Observations on mining laws and mining in Canada, with suggestions for the better development of the mineral resources of the Dominion’, in Geological Survey of Canada, Annual report, 1885 (Ottawa, 1886), app. K, pp. 5-6 (emphasis added). 67 Ibid. , p. 11. 68 To this end Coste recommended that limits be placed on the size of mining tracts, since it was believed that too many small claims stood in the way of acquisition of large mines by ‘good companies’ that would be able to develop the resources properly. On the other hand, if mining properties were too vast, Coste worried that large areas of the deposit would remain undeveloped. What was required was legislation that resulted in the optimum size of landholding in so-called ‘geological’ districts. 69 Coste, ‘Observations on mining laws’, pp. 9-10. 70 Ibid. , p. 13. 71 Ontario Minister of Mines, Report of the Bureau of Mines (Toronto, Government of Ontario, 1891). 72 Cail, Land , p. 71. Most mines at this time were placer mines. 73 The company had to consist of at least 10 men. 74 At various points laws were enacted to regulate the racial composition of the work-force in British Columbia’s mines, with Chinese miners the most frequent target. 75 British Columbia Mineral Act , 1896, quoted in Wyman, Public lands , p. 307. 76 A remarkable collection of this correspondence is held in the Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, BC. 77 Province of Ontario, Report of the Bureau of Mines (Toronto, Ontario Bureau of Mines, 1891), p. 5. 78 Harvey, Justice, nature and the geography of difference . See also Smith, Uneven development ; N. Castree, ‘The nature of produced nature: materiality and knowledge construction in Marxism’, Antipode 27 (1995), pp. 12-28; N. Castree and B. Braun, ‘The construction of nature and the nature of construction: analytical and political tools for building survivable futures’, in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality , pp. 3-42. 79 A. Schmidt, The concept of nature in Marx (London, New Left Books, 1971). 80 Smith, Uneven development , p. 31. 81 Ibid. , pp. 31, 49, 56. 82 D. Harvey, Justice, nature and the geography of difference , p. 131. 83 Haraway, Modest_Witness , p. 141. 84 Smith, Uneven development , p. 20. Smith is quoting Schmidt, The concept of nature , p. 70. 85 B. Latour, ‘To modernize or ecologise? That is the question’, in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality , p. 235.