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India in Maps: Four Centuries of Cartography - Part III: Eastern India

17 March 2026

The present East sale brings together fifty-eight lots tracing the cartographic construction of Eastern India and the Bay of Bengal from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. From early European visions by Münster, Ortelius, and Mercator to monumental Dutch VOC sea charts, these maps reveal the region as a vital crossroads of trade, empire, and exploration. The empirical surveys of D’Anville and Rennell, followed by nineteenth-century political mapping and crisis cartography of 1857, chart Bengal’s rise as an imperial core. Rare modern railway, index, and Indian-printed maps conclude this structured visual history of geography and power.


India in Maps: Four Centuries of Cartography - Part IV: Southern India

24 March 2026

Comprising forty lots, the present Southern India sale traces the cartographic shaping of the peninsula from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Defined by the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, South India entered European geographic consciousness through a world of ports, kingdoms, sacred landscapes, and imperial rivalry. Military siege plans and fortress surveys record the Carnatic and Mysore wars as spatial events, while maritime charts of Calicut, Quilon, Masulipatam, and Pondichéry situate the region within global trade networks. Enlightenment-era missionary and scientific mapping extended knowledge beyond the coast into the Tamil interior, later consolidated by major atlas-makers such as Delisle, Homann, and d’Anville. The sale concludes with hydrographic, administrative, and modern road maps, revealing Southern India as a key theatre where war, commerce, faith, and survey science converged in the making of territorial knowledge.