Resumen de The Corps of Military Topographers of the Russian Empire
Russian and Western European skills combined to produce skilled surveyors and a cartographic tradition which both recorded and documented the expansion of the Russian Empire. Tsar Peter I in the 1720s was the first ruler to recognize cartography's its significance as an important tool in securing Russian access to the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and Pacific Ocean. New scientific bodies, and especially the military from the 1760s, were charged with the mapping of Russia and its new territories, and imperial expansion also brought new cartographic and surveying skills and information from able practitioners in France, Finland, Poland, and elsewhere. New thematic maps were created to assist in the exploitation of the empire's resources and in colonial settlement, especially in Siberia in the nineteenth century. Mapping and exploratory expeditions from the late eighteenth century in the reign of another expansionary ruler, Katherine the Great, led to extensive fur-trapping in the east and Russia's claim to the Aleutian Islands, Alaska and the north-west coast of America. The corps of the military topographers had been the most important and productive body for the training of surveyors and performing surveys of the Russian Empire lands for most of the nineteenth century.
