An Actual Survey of the Provinces of Bengal, Bahar &c. By Major James Rennell, Engineer, Surveyor General, To the Honourable the East India Company, Published by Permission of the Court of Directors, from a Drawing in their Possession; By A. Dury

12th May, 1794

Hand-coloured copper engraved 2-sheet map, joined as two sections

39 x 59 in (99 x 150 cm)
Folded size: 21.65 x 14.76 in (55 x 37.5 cm)

Full Title: An actual survey, of the provinces of Bengal, Bahar &c. By Major James Rennell, Engineer, Surveyor General to the Honourable the East India Company, published by permission of the court of directors, from a drawing in their possession; by A. Dury. Wm. Haydon sculpt. Published 12th May, 1794, by Laurie & Whittle, 53 Fleet Street, London

James Rennell’s An Actual Survey of the Provinces of Bengal, Bahar &c.—Monumental Eastern India Wall Map (London, 1794)

This important 1794 issue by Laurie & Whittle is derived from the pioneering surveys and cartographic work of James Rennell, Surveyor General of Bengal and the architect of the first scientific mapping of British India. Rennell’s delineation of the northern provinces—Delhi, Agra, Oude (Awadh) and Allahabad—formed the cartographic backbone of early East India Company governance, supplying London, Calcutta and the wider European world with an unprecedentedly systematic view of Hindostan’s political and physical geography.

The map presents, with exceptional detail, the network of subahs (provinces), districts, forts, caravan routes, major rivers and administrative centres that shaped the Company’s expanding territorial vision in the decades after the Battle of Buxar. The alluvial plains of the Ganges and Yamuna form the structural core of the composition, with long chains of settlements, serais and market towns revealing the region’s dense pre-colonial communications. The road from Delhi to Patna—one of the most strategically vital corridors in the subcontinent—appears with remarkable clarity, while the Ganges basin is articulated through Rennell’s characteristic combination of hydrographic precision and administrative geometry.

Issued by Andrew Dury, a distinguished London map publisher who specialised in military and political mapping, and re-engraved for Laurie & Whittle, the sheet represents one of the major printed states through which Rennell’s work circulated internationally. It preserves the intellectual ambition of Rennell’s original surveys while translating them into a large-scale engraved format suitable for company offices, diplomatic libraries and European scholarly collections.

As an artefact of early colonial statecraft, the map captures a moment when British power in India was neither secure nor complete but territorially emergent. It charts a Hindostan still marked by the legacy of Mughal administrative geography, even as new boundaries and provincial identities began to crystallise under Company rule. Today, it stands as one of the most historically consequential representations of North India’s political reconfiguration in the late eighteenth century.

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