A Map of the Provinces of Delhi, Agrah, Oude, and Ellahabad, comprehending the Countries lying between Delhi, and the Bengal-Provinces, Surveyed by James Rennell, Surveyor General to the Honourable East-India Comapny
1794
Copper engraving on paper
Sheet Size: 43 x 45 in (109 x 110 cm) (each)
Folded size: 21.46 x 15.75 in (54.5 x 40 cm) (each)
A finely engraved British map delineating the principal Mughal provinces of Northern India—Delhi, Agra, Oudh and Allahabad—capturing the transitional moment when Mughal administrative geography was being recast through the increasingly assertive lens of late-eighteenth-century British cartography
Andrew Dury’s A Map of the Provinces of Delhi, Agrah, Oude and Ellahabad offers a compelling snapshot of Northern India at a moment of profound administrative and political transition, when Mughal provincial geography was increasingly being recapped through the assertive, empirically grounded lens of late-eighteenth-century British cartography. Published in London in 1794 by order of the Court of Directors of the East India Company and surveyed under the authority of James Rennell, Surveyor General to the Company, the map represents one of the most detailed British delineations of the Indo-Gangetic heartland on the eve of full colonial territorial consolidation.
Though structured around the historic Mughal subahs of Delhi, Agra, Oudh (Awadh) and Allahabad, the sheet reflects the growing British imperative to rationalise and codify Hindustan as Company influence expanded after the mid-century. The provinces shown were not only the ceremonial and fiscal core of the Timurid empire but also the strategic axis along which British military, commercial and administrative engagement intensified in the decades following Plassey and Buxar.
The map is engraved with remarkable density and precision. Virtually every village is named, and an extensive network of roads is carefully delineated, revealing the connective infrastructure of North India in unprecedented detail. Innumerable rivers, swamps, and mountain ranges are depicted with equal attention, while regions beyond the surveyed zone—particularly the Himalayas and further north—are left deliberately vague, adhering to the prevailing Enlightenment ethic of empiricism: the map records what is known through observation and resists speculative completion.
Major centres such as Delhi, Agra and Lucknow appear as prominent urban anchors, while the Ganges–Yamuna river system provides the structural backbone of the composition. The toponymy reflects a dual linguistic world, balancing Persianate Mughal nomenclature with emerging anglicised forms, characteristic of British mapping practice before the full institutionalisation of the Great Trigonometrical Survey.
The sheet is further distinguished by its elaborate engraved title in the lower-left quadrant and by a dedication panel in the upper right, where Andrew Dury addresses the Directors of the East India Company with a formal letter of thanks—an unusually explicit reminder of the institutional patronage underpinning British cartographic production in India.
The date of 1794 is especially significant: Mughal authority had contracted sharply, and the provinces here mapped—once integral to imperial governance—were becoming contested terrain between Company administrators, regional nawabs, and the declining imperial centre. Dury’s map thus records not merely geography, but a shifting political landscape, poised between the Mughal administrative legacy and the emerging territorial logic of British rule.
As an object, it stands at the confluence of two traditions: the Persianate provincial order that had structured North India for centuries and the scientific, state-orientated cartography that would soon remake the subcontinent’s spatial imagination. Its inclusion in this sale provides a powerful bridge between the diplomatic and courtly worlds of Roe and Bernier and the systematic mapping enterprises that defined nineteenth-century imperial knowledge.
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