62 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
completed, spanning ten countries and
nearly two thousand miles, from the
tip of Norway to the Black Sea coast
of Ukraine. The line was a monumen-
tal achievement of engineering—it
allowed Struve to determine the cir-
cumference of the Earth with aston-
ishing accuracy, Winchester tells us,
coming within sixteen hundred metres
of the figure NASA settled upon more
than a century later with the aid of
satellite technology.
Winchester is a master at captur-
ing the Old World wonder and ro-
mance of exploits like Struve’s—his
past books have delved into such sub-
jects as the creation of the Oxford
English Dictionary (“The Professor
and the Madman”) and the birth of
modern geology (“The Map That
Changed the World”). In “Land,” his
prose frequently exudes the comfort
and charm of a beloved encyclopedia
come to life, centuries and continents
abutting through the pages: there’s a
micro-history of a hundred-acre tract
he owns in eastern New York, an ap-
preciation of Britain’s once ubiqui-
tous Ordnance Survey maps, and the
saga of the German cartographer Al-
brecht Penck, who sought to bring
far-flung nations together in order to
map the Earth’s entire surface at a
one-to-one-million scale. These early
chapters also read as a lament for by-
gone eras of exploration and map-
making, with Winchester delighting
in the cartographer’s nobility of spirit
and the intellectual honesty of the
craft, wrongly denigrated, he thinks,
by “modern revisionism” and its anti-
imperialist preoccupations.
But Winchester’s nostalgia leads
him to skate over the involvement of
cartographers, surveyors, and other dil-
igent functionaries in the inner work-
ings of conquest and empire. “Physical
geographers back then,” he maintains,
“took pride in remaining as politically
neutral as the land was itself, caring
little for which nation ruled what, only
for the nature of the world’s fantasti-
cally varied surfaces.” In fact, Ameri-
can surveyors in charge of delineating
the U.S. border with Mexico were de-
cidedly less apolitical about their task
than Winchester proposes. The vari-
ous teams of “surveyor-dreamers,” as
he calls them, seemed to take little in-
terest in the nature of the Southwest.
Despite traversing the world’s most
biodiverse desert, they found the flora
“more unpleasant to the sight than the
barren earth itself ”; the landscape, they
reported, was “utterly worthless for any
purpose other than to constitute a bar-
rier.” William H. Emory, who headed
the first post-Gadsden survey, com-
plained in 1856 that the new bound-
ary would limit the “inevitable ex-
pansive force” of America. When the
Gadsden line was resurveyed, in 1892,
the U.S. War Department dispatched
a military escort of twenty enlisted
cavalrymen and thirty infantrymen,
“as a protection against Indians or other
marauders.” In this sense, as the nine-
teenth century’s surveyors and map-
makers moved across the horizon, they
served not only as beacons of scien-
tific progress and civilizational prom-
ise but as grim harbingers of the en-
croaching technology and militarization
that soon came to define ever-hard-
ening lines across the globe.
As Winchester enters the twentieth
century, he begins to grapple more
directly with the enduring violence
wrought by casual imperial boundary-
making. His case in point is Britain’s
postwar partition of India, completed
in a mere handful of weeks during the
summer of 1947 by Sir Cyril Rad-
cliffe—a London lawyer who had never
before been to India—from a dining-
room table in Simla, British India’s“summer capital,” nestled in the foot-
hills of the Himalayas. Radcliffe’s
“bloody line” precipitated widespread
exodus and carnage among Hindus,
Sikhs, and Muslims and left a bewil-
dering jumble of enclaves and exclaves
on either side, islands within islands,
where tens of thousands found them-
selves marooned in nations not their
own. This, Winchester writes, is “land
demarcation made insane,” the inevi-
table consequence of borders concoctedby foreign minds and laid out “in no
sense as a reflection of any settled order
of local history or geography.”T
he narrative of American dispos-
session—the replacement of Na-
tive peoples with white settlers—serves
as a sort of centerpiece for Winchester’s
book. Beginning with a primer on the
underpinnings of colonial ownership,
he describes how the first conquista-
dores were emboldened by the fifteenth-
century Doctrine of Discovery, in which
the Pope affirmed their right to take
possession of foreign lands inhabited
by non-Christians. Similarly, the early
British colonists in Massachusetts and
Virginia found justification for expand-
ing their dominion in the legal and
philosophical writings of figures such
as Hugo Grotius and John Locke, who
argued that unclaimed lands were free
for the taking, and that it was a Chris-
tian duty to own and improve them.
Early settlers readily concocted laws to
authorize the extermination, enslave-
ment, and forcible relocation of one
tribe after another. So potent was the
colonists’ perceived right to usurp ter-
ritory that when the British imposed
their Proclamation Line of 1763, ban-
ning settlement west of the Appala-
chians, it stoked early calls for revolu-
tion against the Crown, imprinting a
violent appetite for land upon our na-
scent national psyche.
Winchester’s wide-angle view mostly
gets the big-picture history right—the
narrative arc of expulsion and exploita-
tion—but when he zooms in he is often
unable to resist the register of grand ad-
venture. Nowhere is this more appar-
ent than in his depiction of the Okla-
homa land run—the iconic scene of
mounted pilgrims stampeding across
an open prairie, staking flags to claim
their own hundred-and-sixty-acre par-
cels, freshly prepared for the taking by
the U.S. Land Office. The moment is
eminently cinematic, and has been por-
trayed in monuments, novels, and films,
including Ron Howard’s 1992 epic, “Far
and Away,” in which Tom Cruise holds
a black claim flag up to the sky and cries
out, “This land is mine! Mine by des-
tiny!,” before being crushed by a falling
horse and dying in the arms of Nicole
Kidman. Despite Winchester’s earlier
acknowledgment of “the apocalypse, in-