There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements of the construction of global European power both in older imperial histories and in post-Foucauldian studies emphasizing social control and governmentality in colonial societies. ‘Mapping’ features in this telling as both a technology in the service of empire and as a metaphor for the colonial project of mastery through knowledge accumulation and control.

In 1729, an enslaved woman named Juana Isabel Curazao fled the island of Curaçao, a small Dutch entrepôt in the southern Caribbean, and made her way across calm waters to the northern coast of the nearby Spanish American mainland (present-day Venezuela), just forty miles down-current and downwind. After ostensibly converting to Catholicism Juana Isabel obtained her freedom and acquired a small plot of land in Curiepe, a town of free blacks which the Spanish had founded in 1721 to protect the coast from the incursions of English, French, and Dutch privateers. Juana Isabel planted cacao trees, hoping to profit from Europe's growing taste for chocolate. Defying Spanish colonial law that prohibited trade with foreigners, thousands of people like Juana Isabel surreptitiously sold cacao pods to Curaçaoan traders, usually small-scale Sephardic Jewish merchants or seafarers of African descent. The traders smuggled sacks of the pods back to Curaçao, where enslaved dockworkers loaded them onto large ocean-going vessels and shipped them to Dutch processing firms across the Atlantic. A generation later, in 1765, Juana Isabel's niece and heir, a free black woman named Ana María Mohele, began a long legal battle to retain the grove, which by then had grown into a 1,000-tree plantation. Spanish colonial authorities challenged Ana Maria's ownership of the land, claiming that her aunt's manumission and property grant both were invalid. Nevertheless, they only confiscated half the property, and allowed Ana Maria to keep the rest.

In 1786, Britain and Spain concluded the Convention of London, a treaty renewing permission for Anglo woodcutters to cut timber within a designated area in the Bay of Honduras. In exchange, Britain affirmed once again Spain's sovereignty over this valuable section of the Central American coast. As a revision of several earlier treaties, this new agreement differed in that, while allowing mahogany cutting for the first time, it attempted to strictly define and limit the boundaries within which the woodcutters (or Baymen as they called themselves) could operate, and took decisive steps to restrict their settlement's expansion. While the two nations hailed the Convention as a welcome bilateral solution to a long-standing inter-imperial conflict, many of the Baymen, especially members of the local white oligarchy, reviled the outcome. In a memorial to George III, the treaty's critics in the Bay dismissed it as the misguided product of presumptuous diplomats:

[T]he court of Madrid may amuse the court of London, with the number of miles and leagues which have been ceded to […] the British Settlement as long as the court of London is pleased to be amused with it. But […] your Memorialists with infinite respect to the superior Abilities and Knowledge and Wisdom of both Courts, most humbly pretend to be better Wood-cutters and better judges of the Soil, the Situation, and the Trees […] than all the courts of Europe […] They speak, and have always spoken, from their Knowledge and Experience.

An Ethiopian man named Surūr appeared before the British Consul at Addis Ababa in December 1933 and told a remarkable story. He had just returned to Ethiopia after enduring more than five years of slavery in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf where he had been forced to work as a pearl diver. When he was eleven years old and out tending cattle in the Wallamo region of Ethiopia around 1925, he was seized by kidnappers who took him to Tajura on the Somali coast and shipped him along with fifty other captives to Jedda, where he was sold to a man who took him to Qatar and eventually sold him to a pearl merchant who engaged him as a diver. As Surūr explained to the consul, he tried twice to escape from his master. The first time, he fled to the British Residency Agent, ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, in Dubai, who promised to protect him, but then returned him to his master, who severely beat him. Shortly after, he fled to the British agency office in Sharjah, only to find that the Residency Agent was the same ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, who again returned him to his master, who this time beat him until he was unconscious. Surūr finally managed to escape by fleeing to a boat bound for Basra. There, he met some Somali men working as stokers on a British steamer who assisted him in getting to Djibouti by way of Muscat. When he arrived in Djibouti he was interrogated by port officers, and his story was passed on to the British consulat Addis Ababa who interviewed him and forwarded his story to the Political Agent at Muscat.

In 1767, settlers on the western frontier of Georgia in North America sent a dire petition to their governor begging for protection. They claimed that local Creek Indians had stolen their horses and planned imminently to destroy their livestock and to kill their families. Before the governor could respond, the settlers crossed the Indian boundary to loot and burn a Creek village. In doing so they galvanized the imperial legal order into action – not against Creek horse thieves but against settler vigilantes on Creek land. At the urging of London officials, the governor of Georgia had the settlers arrested and charged, first with a felony, and when that failed, with ‘abuse and misdemeanour at common law against government’. However, Georgia's jurors refused to hold them accountable on either charge.