THE ATLAS QUARTERLY · CHAPTER 01 04 / 24

— CHAPTER ONE — A CENTURY OF EMPIRES

# The Imperial
Age.

Between the Congress of Vienna and the guns of August, the world was redrawn in the language of empire — charted, claimed, and catalogued by a handful of capitals that believed history belonged to them.

PLATE I EXHIBIT 04.B
[archival photograph]
The west colonnade at first light.
PHOTOGRAPHED C. 1887 · ARCHIVE 0341.B

PERIOD

1815–1914
Vienna to Sarajevo — the long peace of empire.

REACH

84%
of the globe under colonial or imperial rule by 1914.

CAPITALS

Six
London · Paris · Berlin · Vienna · St Petersburg · Constantinople.
THE ATLAS QUARTERLY · CHAPTER 01 05 / 24

— SECTION TWO — THE BERLIN CONFERENCE

## Fourteen men, one table, one winter — and the map of Africa was rewritten without a single African in the room.

NOV 1884

The summit convenes in Berlin under Bismarck.

FEB 1885

The General Act is signed. A continent is partitioned.

JUL 1914

The arrangement dies at Sarajevo, along with the century that drew it.
05 / 24
THE ATLAS QUARTERLY · INTERMEZZO 06 / 24

PLATE III

## A century ends
with a gunshot.

What began as cartography ended as catastrophe. The map outlived the men who drew it by exactly one generation.

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