Wo entstanden die ersten Nationalatlanten?

Summary

This article reassesses the origins of the national atlas and challenges the widely repeated claim that Finland’s 1899 Suomen Kartasto was the world’s first example. Defining a national atlas as a coordinated publication of maps, explanatory texts, and supplementary illustrations that systematically represents the natural and social complexity of an entire state, the authors identify two earlier works: the Physikalisch-Statistischer Atlas des Deutschen Reichs (1876–1878) and the Physikalisch-Statistischer Hand-Atlas von Oesterreich-Ungarn (1882–1887). Both combined physical, demographic, and economic mapping and significantly influenced the later Finnish atlas. Drawing on archival and collection research as well as detailed analysis of cartographic objects, the study focuses on the Austrian cartographers Josef Chavanne and Franz Ritter von Le Monnier. Chavanne’s scholarship encompassed climatology, polar research, Africa, and physical mapping; as editor of the Austro-Hungarian atlas, he produced most maps in its physical section. Le Monnier specialized in population statistics, electoral geography, linguistic and ethnic distributions, and constructed most of the atlas’s statistical maps. Their collaboration yielded a scientifically sophisticated and technically advanced thematic atlas that represented a high point of late nineteenth-century Austrian cartography and shaped atlas production in the twentieth century. The findings therefore relocate the emergence of the national atlas to Central Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, rather than Finland in 1899.