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12 Maps That Changed the World

Is there such a thing as a perfect map?
URI FRIEDMAN TEXT SIZE
DEC 30, 2013 | GLOBAL

The rendering of America and Africa in Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 world map (Wikimedia
Commons)

In June 2012, Brian McClendon, an executive at Google, announced that

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Google Maps and Google Earth were part of a far loftier pursuit than
edging out Apple and Facebook in the map services market. Google,
McClendon wrote in a blog post, was engaged in nothing less than a
"never-ending quest for the perfect map."

"Weve been building a comprehensive base map of the entire globe

based on public and commercial data, imagery from every level (satellite,
aerial and street level) and the collective knowledge of our millions of
users," McClendon noted. By strapping cameras to the backs of intrepid
hikers, mobilizing users to fact-check map data, and modeling the world in
3D, he added, Google was moving one step closer to mapmaking
perfection.

It was the kind of technological triumphalism that Jerry Brotton would

likely greet with a knowing smile.

"All cultures have always believed that the map they valorize is real and
true and objective and transparent," Brotton, a professor of Renaissance
studies at Queen Mary University of London, told me. "All maps are
always subjective.... Even todays online geospatial applications on all your
mobile devices and tablets, be they produced by Google or Apple or
whoever, are still to some extent subjective maps."

There are, in other words, no perfect mapsjust maps that (more-or-less)

perfectly capture our understanding of the world at discrete moments in
time. In his new book, A History of the World in 12 Maps, Brotton
masterfully catalogs the maps that tell us most about pivotal periods in
human history. I asked him to walk me through the 12 maps he selected
(you can click on each map below to enlarge it).

1. Cartography's Foundation: Ptolemy's Geography (150

AD)

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A 15th-century reconstruction based on Ptolemy's projections of the world (Wikimedia

Commons)

Humans have been sketching maps for millennia, but Claudius Ptolemy
was the rst to use math and geometry to develop a manual for how to
map the planet using a rectangle and intersecting linesone that
resurfaced in 13th-century Byzantium and was used until the early 17th
century. The Alexandria-based Greek scholar, who may never have drawn
a map himself, described the latitude and longitude of more than 8,000
locations in Europe, Asia, and Africa, projecting a north-oriented,
Mediterranean-focused world that was missing the Americas, Australasia,
southern Africa (you can see Africa skirting the bottom of the map and
then blending into Asia), the Far East, the Pacic Ocean, and most of the
Atlantic Ocean. Ptolemy's Geography was a "book with a 1,500-year
legacy," Brotton says.

2. Cultural Exchange: Al-Idrisi's World Map (1154)

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Wikimedia Commons

Al-Sharif al-Idrisi, a Muslim from Al-Andalus, traveled to Sicily to work for

the Norman King Roger II, producing an Arabic-language geography guide
that drew on Jewish, Greek, Christian, and Islamic traditions and
contained two world maps: the small, circular one above, and 70 regional
maps that could be stitched together. Unlike east-oriented Christian world
maps at the time, al-Idrisi's map puts south at top in the tradition of
Muslim mapmakers, who considered Mecca due south (Africa is the
crescent-shaped landmass at top, and the Arabian Peninsula is in the
center). Unlike Ptolemy, al-Idrisi depicted a circumnavigable Africablue
sea surrounds the globe. Ultimately, the map is concerned with

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representing physical geography and blending traditionsnot

mathematics or religion. "There are no monsters on his maps," Brotton
says.

3. Christian Faith: Hereford's Mappa Mundi (1300)

Wikimedia Commons

This map from England's Hereford Cathedral depicts "what the world
looked like to medieval Christians," Brotton says. The organizing principle
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in the east-oriented map is time, not space, and specically biblical time;
with Christ looming over the globe, the viewer travels spiritually from the
Garden of Eden at top down to the Pillars of Hercules near the Strait of
Gibralter at bottom (for a more detailed tour, check out this handy guide to
the map's landmarks). At the center is Jerusalem, marked with a crucix,
and to the right is Africa, whose coast is dotted with grotesque monsters in
the margins. "Once you get to the edges of what you know, those are
dangerous places," Brotton explains.

4. Imperial Politics: Kwon Kun's Kangnido Map (1402)

Wikimedia Commons

What's most striking about this Korean map, designed by a team of royal
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astronomers led by Kwon Kun, is that north is at top. "It's strange because
the rst map that looks recognizable to us as a Western map is a map from
Korea in 1402," Brotton notes. He chalks this up to power politics in the
region at the time. "In South Asian and Chinese imperial ideology, you
look up northwards in respect to the emperor, and the emperor looks south
to his subjects," Brotton explains. Europe is a "tiny, barbaric speck" in the
upper left, with a circumnavigable Africa below (it's unclear whether the
dark shading in the middle of Africa represents a lake or a desert). The
Arabian Peninsula is to Africa's right, and India is barely visible. China is
the gigantic blob at the center of the map, with Korea, looking
disproportionately large, to its right and the island of Japan in the bottom
right.

5. Territorial Exploration: Waldseemuller's Universalis

Cosmographia (1507)

Viking/Penguin

This work by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller is

considered the most expensive map in the world because, as Brotton

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notes, it is "America's birth certicate"a distinction that prompted the

Library of Congress to buy it from a German prince for $10 million. It is
the rst map to recognize the Pacic Ocean and the separate continent of
"America," which Waldseemuller named in honor of the then-still-living
Amerigo Vespucci, who identied the Americas as a distinct landmass
(Vespucci and Ptolemy appear at the top of the map). The map consists of
12 woodcuts and incorporates many of the latest discoveries by European
explorers (you get the sense that the woodcutter was asked at the last
minute to make room for the Cape of Good Hope). "This is the moment
when the world goes bang, and all these discoveries are made over a short
period of time," Brotton says.

6. Politicized Geography: Ribeiro's World Map (1529)

Wikimedia Commons

The Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro composed this map amid a

bitter dispute between Spain and Portugal over the Moluccas, an island
chain in present-day Indonesia and hub for the spice trade (in 1494, the
two countries had signed a treaty dividing the world's newly discovered

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lands in two). After Ferdinand Magellan's expedition circumnavigated the

globe for the rst time in 1522, Ribeiro, working for the Spanish crown,
placed the "Spice Islands," inaccurately, just inside the Spanish half of his
seemingly scientic world maps. Ribeiro may have known that the islands
(which appear on the far-left and far-right sides of the map) actually
belonged to Portugal, but he also knew who paid the bills. "This is the rst
great example of politics manipulating geography," Brotton says.

7. Territorial Navigation: Mercator's World Map (1569)

Wikimedia Commons

Next to Ptolemy, Brotton says, Gerardus Mercator is the most inuential

gure in the history of mapmaking. The Flemish-German cartographer
tried "on a at piece of paper to mimic the curvature of the earths
surface," permitting "him to draw a straight line from, say, Lisbon to the
West Coast of the States and maintain an active line of bearing." Mercator,
who was imprisoned by Catholic authorities for alleged Lutheran heresy,
designed his map for European navigators. But Brotton thinks it had a

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higher purpose as well. "I think its a map about stoicism and
transcendence," he says. "If you look at the world from several thousands
miles up, at all these conicts in religious and political life, youre like ants
running around." Mercator has been accused of Eurocentrism, since his
projection, which is still occasionally used today, increasingly distorts
territory as you go further north and south from the equator. Brotton
dismisses this view, arguing that Europe isn't even at the center of the
map.

8. Commercial Cartography: Blaeu's Atlas maior (1662)

Viking/Penguin

Working for the Dutch East India Company, Joan Blaeu produced a vast
atlas with hundreds of baroque maps gracing thousands of pages. "He's the
last of a tradition: the single, brilliant, magician-like mapmaker who says,
'I can magically show you the entire world,'" Brotton says. "By the late
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17th century, with joint stock companies mapping every corner of the
world, anonymous teams of people are crunching data and producing
maps." Blaeu's market-oriented maps weren't cutting-edge. But he did
break with a mapmaking tradition dating back to Ptolemy of placing the
earth at the center of the universe. At the top of the map, the sun is at the
center of personications of the ve known planets at the timein a nod to
Copernicus's theory of the cosmos, even as the earth, divided into two
hemispheres, remains at the center of the map, in deference to Ptolemy
(Ptolemy is in the upper left, and Copernicus in the upper right). "Blau
quietly, cautiously says I think Copernicus is probably right," Brotton says.

9. National Mapping: Cassini's Map of France (1744)

Library of Congress

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Beginning under Louis XIV, four generations of the Cassini family

presided over the rst attempt to survey and map every meter of a country.
The Cassinis used the science of triangulation to create this nearly 200-
sheet topographic map, which French revolutionaries nationalized in the
late 18th century. This, Brotton says, "is the birth of what we understand
as modern nation-state mapping ... whereas, before, mapmaking was in
private hands. Now, in the Google era, mapmaking is again going into
private hands."

10. Geopolitics: Mackinder's 'Geographical Pivot of

History' (1904)

Viking/Penguin

Don't let the modesty of this "little line drawing" fool you, Brotton says: It
"basically created the whole notion that politics is driven to some extent by
geographic issues." The English geographer and imperialist Halford
Mackinder included the drawing in a paper arguing that Russia and
Central Asia constituted "the pivot of the world's politics." Brotton
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believes this ideathat control of certain pivotal regions can translate into
international hegemonyhas inuenced gures ranging from the Nazis to
George Orwell to Henry Kissinger.

11. Geoactivism: Peters's Projection (1973)

Wikimedia Commons

In 1973, the left-wing German historian Arno Peters unveiled an

alternative to Mercator's allegedly Eurocentric projection: a world map
depicting countries and continents according to their actual surface area
hence the smaller-than-expected northern continents, and Africa and
South America appearing, in Brotton's words, "like long, distended tear
drops." The 'equal area' projection, which was nearly identical to an earlier
design by the Scottish clergyman James Gall, was a hit with the press and
progressive NGOs. But critics argued that any projection of a spherical
surface onto a plane surface involves distortions, and that Peters had
amplied these by committing serious mathematical errors. "No map is
any better or worse than any other map," Brotton says. "It's just about what

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agenda it pursues."

The West Wing enshrined the Peters Projection in pop culture during an
episode in which the ctitious Organization of Cartographers for Social
Equality lobbies the White House to make it mandatory for public schools
to teach Peters's map rather than Mercator's.

12. Virtual Mapping: Google Earth (2005)

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Google is at the forefront of innovations in digital mapmaking, Brotton

says. But he also notes that the company sees maps as an adjunct to search
and advertising. "My question is what gets on maps, who pays to get on
maps now, and who can't pay and is therefore not on maps?" he asks. Back
in Mercator's day, source code consisted of the projection the cartographer
used and the data he fed into it. Now, Brotton notes, we don't know what
source code Google and other online mapping applications are using. And
this at a time when Google, which oers users more than 20 petabytes of
imagery, is working with far more material than a country can match.
"Companies can now produce maps in more detail than, say, the U.K.
Ordnance Survey, but without any peer-observation process," Brotton
asserts.

"We always get the map that our age deserves," he adds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

URI FRIEDMAN is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers global affairs.

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