We have there [in Palestine] a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look! Scattered over the world, a people without a country. (Lord Shaftesbury, Chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement for 1875, London, 1875, p. 116)

Central to the Victorian ‘peaceful’ Crusader revivalism of the 19th century and the successful opening of the ‘Holy Land’ to Europe’s geo-political and cultural-religious penetration was the British Palestine Exploration Fund and ‘Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine’ between 1871 and 1877. British scientific and technological advances in cartography and cadastral mapping were fully harnessed for empire and imperial expansionism in the Middle East.

Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency of Britain and is one of the largest producers of maps in the world. The British official agency’s name indicates its original military and strategic purposes and its origins go back to the mapping of Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and the absence of military maps and detailed knowledge of the Scottish Highlands. The British were not the first to conduct instrumental strategic mapping of Palestine. The first modern maps of Palestine, based on an instrumental survey and using the most developed scientific instruments of the time, had already been produced by Colonel Pierre Jacotin, a French map-maker and Director of the French Survey Military Corps during Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt and Palestine, who in 1799, on Napoleon’s orders, prepared dozens of secret maps of Egypt, Sinai and Palestine. Six of those maps show parts of Palestine, especially the parts of the country through which Napoleon’s army marched in February to June 1799. Jacotin continued to work on these maps after he returned to France and they were eventually published in 1826, and became widely known as the ‘Jacotin Atlas’, labelling Palestine in French and Arabic as ‘Palestine or Holy Land’/‘land of al-Quds’ فلسطين أو أرض قدس) ) (also Khatib 2003; Karmon 1960: 155–173, 244–253).