This chapter is grounded in the proposition that maritime trade needs to be historicized not only in terms of flow – people, ships, commodities, payments and so on – but also in terms of enabling processes, specifically those associated with making the space, literally and figuratively, within which trade, on the terms that it is constructed, could proceed. That is the reason for the title of the chapter. The issue is settlement and naval surveying in northern Australia in the first half of the nineteenth century with special reference to Melville Island, Port Essington, the Torres Strait and Cape York. I will be making two arguments: first, that naval surveying, alongside other simultaneously enacted scientific practices made imperial space within a specific imperial-commercial discourse; or, to put it in a slightly different way, nautical scientific practices, in which I include activities such as naval charting, land surveying – including coastal representations – tidal and meteorological observations, plus natural history and ethnography, historically underpinned and were underpinned by making empire. Second, I will be arguing that settlement and surveying were different practices, which could, in specific places and times, be enacted together, separately or as substitutes, the choice depending on historical circumstance. I maintain that during the first half of the nineteenth century, as the commercial space within which Australia existed shifted eastward, settlement gave way to surveying as the preferred method of establishing British power.

I also hope the chapter will contribute in a tentative manner to a growing body of work that is reviewing and reassessing the history of empire, particularly its contingent processes. Two such contributions come to mind. The first of these is to explore the articulation between the making of imperial space away from the metropolis and within the metropolis itself. I’m thinking here, for example, of the articulation between the colonial environment and landscapes and metropolitan museums through the agency of natural history, ethnographic collections and painting. The surveying of colonial waters and the publication of Admiralty charts may also be explored in this way. The second aim is to try to decentre empire, to pluck it from the stiff, constrained and overarching discourse in which it has been lodged for some time and allow it more free-standing, flowing and, especially, contingent possibilities.