Encountering Colonial Worlds Through Missionary Maps in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Grand Duchy of Finland

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Finnish Missionary Society utilized mass-produced maps and related reading materials to fuel geographical imaginations that concerned non-European populations and lands to gain support for the missionary cause between 1859 and the mid-1890s. The chapter shows how the maps and texts entangled the Finnish audiences with the processes of colonization in complex ways: they reproduced discussions concerning human difference, generated geographies of cannibalism, and entwined Finnish missionary work with discourse of colonial philanthropy. Once the FMS started its own mission in Owambo, the maps were utilized to bridge the geographical distance and make the colonial space of “Ovamboland” their own.