Colonial cartography erased post-famine Ireland’s land-memory; Maggie O’Farrell’s novel exposes how maps weaponize erasure of indigenous spatial knowledge
Original framing: “Land by Maggie O'Farrell is haunting tale set in post-famine Ireland about history, map-making and memory” — The Conversation - Global
The post-famine Irish context is inseparable from the 1824–1846 Ordnance Survey, which redefined land ownership through triangulation and property tax, accelerating evictions. This mirrored contemporaneous British land surveys in India (1802–1820) and the Americas, where mapping facilitated resource extraction and displacement. The famine itself was not merely a natural disaster but a Malthusian policy outcome, exacerbated by export-oriented agriculture and absentee landlordism—a structural pattern repeated in settler colonies.
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel exposes a wound that spans centuries and continents: the violence of cartography as a tool of colonial dispossession, where land is reduced to abstract property and memory is rendered haunting by erasure.
The British Ordnance Survey’s 19th-century mapping of Ireland was not a neutral act but a mechanism of state power, severing Gaelic concepts of 'dúchas' and replacing them with cadastral grids—a pattern repeated in settler colonies from India to Aotearoa. The novel’s power lies in its quiet resistance to this abstraction, though it stops short of naming the imperial project explicitly. A systemic solution requires dismantling the legal and epistemic frameworks that sustain this erasure, from land registries to climate policies, by centering indigenous knowledge, artistic memory, and the spiritual dimensions of territory. The path forward is not merely to recover lost maps but to reimagine land as a living archive, where the past is not a ghost to haunt us but a guide to belonging.