The Mapping of Taiwan, Desired Economies, Competing Monopolies, New Perspectives on Cartography, Competing Monopolies, and the Destiny of Taiwan.
Published in agreement with Jerome F. Keating
In The Mapping of Taiwan, Keating steps back and places Taiwan within the shaping framework of world events and global economies. It is a Gestalt of Taiwan’s history and of life, but from the crass standpoint of trade, commodities, greed and monopolies. Such are all part and parcel of desired economies that often in turn lead to coveted geographies that must be mapped. This book (80 to 85 all color pages of maps and photographs that along with 50 pages of text/context) traces the historical mapping of Taiwan by numerous nations from the 1500s to the present. Included are developments in cartography, the various mapmaking houses and the artistry of maps.
At a different level the book examines how the West came to Asia for the Spice Islands and how Taiwan was later drawn out of its isolation into a vortex of the desired economies and competing monopolies of various nations. Some nations eventually coveted it and colonized it. Taiwan had for a long time been mapped by outsiders, however it can now direct its own economy and map itself.
In a larger framework and larger vortex (a Gestalt of Life?) deconstructing the maps reveals hidden agendas and unsaid messages of people and nations following a variety of competing personal and national paradigms of religion, individualism, greed, power, patriotism, ideologies etc. etc. This book keeps its focus on the mapping of Taiwan, but it also points to these much wider dimensions of life. Maps convey information, yet what seems to be an event is really a construct of a specific quasi-symbolic system conveying information. Visual representations have their own message, but encoded in them also are other multiple messages to be deconstructed. Cartographers in turn have their own multiple motivations and constraints in making maps. A coffee table size book published by SMC in 2011.
ISBN: 978-957-41-8641-9
Reviews
GIO Taiwan Today
Taiwan Communiqué
Noah Buchan of Taipei Times
