The East Indies, with the Roads. By Thomas Jefferys, Geographer to the King. MDCCLXVIII . . . 1768

Circa 1772

Copper engraving on paper

Rare two-sheet unmounted map of India
North India: 21 x 54 in (52.5 x 135 cm)
South India: 23.5 x 54 in (58.7 x 135 cm)
Folded size: 23.23 x 16.14 in (59 x 41 cm). Will form a huge map of 44.5 x 54 in (113 x 137.1 cm) approximately, when both the sheets are joined together

Mapping Empire by Road — Jefferys’ Monumental East India Company Survey of the Subcontinent (Circa 1772)

This monumental two-sheet engraved map by Thomas Jefferys, Geographer to King George III, presents one of the most ambitious mid-eighteenth-century British printed visions of India and the East Indies, issued at a formative moment in the territorial expansion of the East India Company. Dedicated to the Company’s Directors, the map reflects an emerging imperial imperative: the systematic plotting of internal communications, military logistics, and commercial circulation across the subcontinent.

Distinguished above all by its extensive delineation of roads and caravan routes, the map marks a decisive shift from earlier maritime-focused cartography toward inland territorial measurement and governance. Rendered on a precise latitude–longitude grid, the composition integrates a remarkable density of geographic and administrative detail. Cities great and small are identified throughout—Delhi (Shah Jehan Abad), Agra, Bombay, Goa, Calcutta, Pondicherry, and countless regional centres—alongside temples, treaty lines, political boundaries, mountain ranges, lakes, swamps, river systems, and transport corridors. The result is a document of exceptional value not only for cartographic history but for historians tracing political change and infrastructural development in eighteenth-century India.

The map depicts the strongest concentration of information in southern India and the rich eastern provinces of Bahar and Bengal, regions of intensified Company presence and strategic interest. Here, roads, oases, archaeological and sacred sites, and topographical features are carefully articulated, underscoring the administrative priorities of British power along the Coromandel Coast and the Ganges basin. By contrast, large portions of central and northern India remain comparatively sparse, explicitly noted as “little known and in a manner independent”—a revealing admission of the limits of British geographic intelligence beyond the Company’s established zones of influence.

The original hand-coloured outline distinguishes provincial divisions, while the fine copperplate engraving preserves clarity across a highly information-dense surface. Jefferys’ articulation of roads, passes, and inland corridors situates the map firmly within the Enlightenment transformation of geography into an instrument of statecraft, surveillance, and infrastructural planning, anticipating the more systematic trigonometrical surveys that would dominate the nineteenth century.

As a large-scale and visually commanding production, The East Indies, with the Roads remains one of the most significant British printed maps of India of its era—an imposing synthesis of imperial ambition, geographic knowledge, and the evolving mechanics of colonial control.

NON-EXPORTABLE

This lot is offered at RESERVE

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