Tim Sharp: Chain Reaction

Gunter’s chain: 66’, 1/10 furlong or 1/80 mile, divided into 100 links of 7.92”. Coincidentally, one of the main companies for producing the chains was situated not far from where I went to school in Birmingham, England. I found out that they also produced chains for convicts and fetters for slaves. Nowadays one of the company specialities is handcuffs for police forces.

a chain reaction

Historically, accurate surveying required precise measurement over long distances; incontestable borders require surveying on a large scale using triangulation. Starting from a known position, a line of sight measurement of angles is made to two other points – a mountain top, a rock, a tower, and repeated at those other points. One of the side of the triangle must be measured on the ground, in the past using some form of chain. The combination of all these measurements allows position and distance to be calculated. The survey is extended using one of the sides of the previously measured triangle as the baseline for the next in what becomes a tessellation of interconnected triangles, a triangulation network.

Early Canadian surveyors were often soldiers; in British Columbia it was a detachment of the Royal Engineers. Their main task was to survey and fix the 49th parallel which, according to the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, was the border between two empires, one declared, the other de facto.  Apart from spending time organising property deals, they also laid out New Westminster which was intended to be – and for a time was – the capital of British Columbia. They also built the road to the thriving settlement of Vancouver on the ice-free Burrard Inlet situated slightly to the north-west. But even civil surveyors were imperial foot soldiers with lack of long-term political clout (with notable exceptions which serve to underline the contemporary possibility of taking a more differentiated and sensitive position with regard to the original inhabitants of the country). Matthew Edney, acknowledging the active agency of surveyors and mapmakers in the imperialist scheme of things underway on the other side of the planet, involving the other Indians as it were, pointed out: “In short, triangulation-based surveys are rooted, like all other cartographic practice, in cultural conceptions of space and in the politics of manipulating spatial representations.”1

In India the issue was not about individual settlers acquiring title to plots of land, but rather about rationally defining and standardising land ownership in order to make tax assessments based on the estimated level of agricultural production, the administrative foundation for revenue extraction in its purest form. Many regions of India had a long-established, functional (and functioning) agricultural system which, prior to British annexation and the arrival of a ‘free market economy’, included communal grain storage as an emergency back-up for periods of drought, an institution Vattel explicitly approved of for European governments.2 One of the main differences between east and west was that the inhabitants of North America were hunters and gatherers and, when they engaged in cultivation, were not solely dependent on their produce. It was a difference with dire consequences.

replicating structures
It is tempting to leave the story here, just another story about a colonial elsewhere, distanced in space and time, a story that, as Herman Merivale of the Colonial Office in London saw clearly, consists of a series “of wretched details of ferocity and treachery”.3 However, since I remembered reading a quotation from Thomas Spence’s A Lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on Nov. 8th 1775, for the printing of which the Society did the Author the Honour to expel him, I wanted to find out if there were relevant patterns already present in the initiating colonial culture.

Landowners, says Spence, criticising the status quo:
…can, by laws of their own making, oblige every living creature to remove off his property (which to the great distress of mankind, is too often put in execution); so of consequence, were all the landholders to be of one mind, and determined to take their properties into their own hands, all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here.4

Spence was not engaged in idle philosophical speculation. What he asserted was written in historical circumstances and conditions which continued into mid-nineteenth century England. He offered a way of considering the background of those colonisers who were so adamant about their racial superiority, fitness to inherit the earth and security of tenure – in other words those, whose instrumentalised racism was, as Hugh Brody puts it, ‘relentless and purposeful”.5 Spence’s concerns were directed to the commons in England, communal rights of use of land – the grazing, hunting, brick-making and firewood collecting which had been enjoyed by cottagers and villagers from time immemorial, and which were being systematically abrogated by privately-introduced parliamentary legislation — passed, in the main, by the beneficiaries themselves wearing different hats. At times the changes took place quietly and at others, as E P Thompson has shown, it needed all the force of draconic laws creating innumerable new capital offences (in at least two sense of the word) to establish the new regime. He points out, ‘The Hanoverian Whigs …were a hard lot of men. And they remind us that stability, no less than revolution, may have its own kind of terror’.6 With many traditional-use rights curtailed and a campaign of systematic enclosures of common land underway, many of those who lived on and from the land lost their independence and were forced into wage labour. For the beneficiaries, this made for more ‘rational’ land use while having the added ‘benefit’ of creating a tide of emigration to the cities to service the growing industries there. It also started a stream of emigration to the colonies that was to last into the twentieth century.

Scotland exhibits parallels: after the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 had been quashed, the military potential of the clan system was dismantled. Clansmen were disarmed, the kilt forbidden and clan chiefs were turned into the sole and absolute legal owners of clan estates. The potential increase in wealth represented by lucrative sheep farming and selling wool to the rapidly expanding and well-protected textile industry, proved too great for most clan chiefs leading to the Highland Clearances, the precondition for profitable business and the coercive motivation for many to leave their homeland in search of land and security elsewhere.

Looking at those events from the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis Hyde summarises: it was, he says,
the same war the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. 7
In short, the commodification of land and its concentration in a few hands was a qualitatively different way than before.

nstallation of Chain Reaction in the former Kartographisches Institut in Vienna. It was he headquarters where the survey information from all over the Habsburg Empire came together to be made into maps, military and civilian. The rectangle, marked by red chalk at its corners, is where one of the heavy printing presses stood.

1  Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765-1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999
2  Vattel, de Emmeric. The Law of Nations, Switzerland, 1758
3  Merivale, Herman.  Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies, 1841.
4  Spence, Thomas, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine, M Beer.  The Pioneers of Land Reform, 1775.
5  Brody, Hugh. The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntryre, 2001
6  Thompson, E P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act. London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2013.
7   Hyde; Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1979). New York: Vintage, 2007.
8  Bowering, George. Bowering’s B.C.: A Swashbuckling History. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1997.

Tim Sharp, born in Scotland, lives and works in Vienna. Visual artist (video, photography, installation) and writer. Numerous exhibitions and film festivals in Austria and abroad. Recent public space installation for Vienna Festival: Ruprechtsstiege/Morzinplatz. www.timsharp.at