This week’s image from The Connectivity of Things is a colonialist map. It was published as a fold-out part of Prosper Enfantin’s 1843 book Colonisation de l’Algérie. In this treatise, the Saint-Simonian cult leader Enfantin was upfront about the strategic placement of settlements and settlers in Algeria. While the early socialist movement of Saint-Simonians movement had started with utopian dreams of a new networked unity of orient and occident in the 1830s, this map deliberately drew a reséau de soumission –– a network of colonial submission and police power.
Chapter 3 of the book is focused on theory and heuristics of writing network history in „An Archive of Networking.“ Yet, this map features prominently in chapter 4 of the book. It is called „Channels: The Politics of Networking around 1850,“ and it deals with the ambivalent history of network ideology and practice in early socialism. There’s not just a breathtaking colonial history to be told here –– which includes the Suez Canal –– but also one of early feminism, romanticism and social engineering. I’ll come back to the Saint-Simoniennes and Saint-Simoniens next week.
