For all their apparent simplicity, maps make evocative statements about the way the world is – embellished, as they are with textual detail, colours, shading and the like. The maps of Africa that European merchants and explorers generated in previous centuries are so captivating to modern eyes precisely because they obviously distort size and shape – and famously fill in the empty spaces in inventive ways.1 Contemporary cartography is less obviously idiosyncratic, but it harbours its own blind spots and pointed omissions – which becomes painfully obvious when actors are first confronted with the puzzling unfamiliarity of a map depicting a place they know intimately. As others have noted, maps are not innocent things, but have historically been associated with projects of state-making and enclosure in different parts of the world – including those bound up with empire.2 The seductive power of maps resides in their normalizing character, which serves to close down alternative ways of seeing while authorizing particular modes of doing. In that sense, maps have been constitutive of power relations in their own right.