It was this last book that led Gall to invent his new map projection. In trying to find a suitable method for depicting the stars, Gall realized that by ‘representing only one constellation in each diagram’, he was ‘able to present it on a large scale, and without appreciable distortion, which could not be done if a large portion of the heavens were mapped on the same sheet’.40 In a move that was strikingly reminiscent of the great Renaissance cosmographers, Gall later explained how he transferred his astronomical projection onto a comprehensive vision of the earth below. ‘It then occurred to me’, he wrote in 1885, ‘that the same, or a similar projection, would give a complete map of the world, which had never been done before; and, on drawing a projection with the latitudes rectified at the 45th parallel, I found that the geographical features and comparative areas were conserved to a degree that was very satisfactory.’41
Gall’s presentation to the BAAS meeting held in Glasgow in September 1855 was entitled ‘On Improved Monographic Projections of the World’. Arguing that only cylindrical projections ‘can represent the whole world in one diagram’, Gall explained that such projections, including Mercator’s, inevitably sacrificed some qualities (such as area and orientation) in favour of others. ‘The best projection’, he concluded, ‘is that which will divide the errors, and combine the advantages’ of a range of different qualities.42 With this aim, he proceeded to offer not one but three different world projections – not just the orthographic, but also a stereographic and isographic projection (a variation on the equirectangular projection). Ironically, considering Peters’s later adoption of the orthographic projection, Gall concluded that ‘the Stereographic is best of all; for although it has none of the perfections of the others, it has fewer faults, and combines all the advantages of the others in harmonious proportions’. However, he still believed that there was a limited place for the orthographic projection. It was, he argued, ‘a valuable map for showing the comparative area occupied by different subjects, such as land and water, as well as many other scientific and statistical facts’. He conceded that ‘the geographical features are more distorted on this than on any of the others, but they are not distorted so as to be unrecognisable; and so long as that is the case, its advantages are not too dearly bought’.43
Even Gall’s map was not the first of its kind. The very first equal-area map of the world on a rectangular projection and based on reproducible mathematical calculations was invented as early as 1772 by the Swiss mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert. By using the equator as his standard parallel, Lambert produced a map which retained equal-area properties, but suffered serious distortion north and south. Like Gall, Lambert acknowledged the impossibility of producing a world map that was both conformal and equal-area, and went on to produce a conformal map on a conical projection, to demonstrate the options available between the two methods. Gall appears not to have known of Lambert’s projection, but effectively reproduced it with the important modification of two standard parallels either side of the poles.44
Unlike Peters, Gall did not receive immediate condemnation for the unreliability or duplication of his new projection. There were several reasons for this. Gall disseminated his findings within a Victorian institution that was amenable to his goals and philosophy. The BAAS was founded in the same year as the Royal Geographical Society, but with a different purpose. It was a more peripatetic organization, which held meetings in provincial cities across the country which were designed to educate and enlighten middle-class laymen in the practical application of science for the betterment of Victorian society.45 Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, the Prince Consort, was an honorary member, and its speakers included such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage and David Livingstone. Rather than challenging the moral and intellectual ethos of Victorian society, Gall was energetically involved in delineating it by his talks and publications on religion, education and science. He acknowledged that his projections were limited, and never claimed they could play a part in anyone’s moral improvement. Reflecting on their impact in an article written thirty years later, Gall could have been addressing Peters when he observed that ‘it is always difficult to introduce changes when long established custom has created a rut’. He also confessed sadly that over the subsequent twenty years ‘I was the only person that used them’.46 This, of course, was not a fate which befell Peters’s projection.
For many of Peters’s critics, the fact that his ‘new’ projection was almost identical to Gall’s was at best poor scholarship; at worst it betrayed an opportunistic plagiarism. Placed alongside Gall’s more modest claims for the significance of his orthographic projection, and his wider understanding of the partiality of all projections, Peters’s claims for the radical and universal status of his projection look ridiculously inflated. But it also revealed the gulf that had opened up between professional and public perceptions of mapmaking between the 1850s and the 1970s. While Gall was broadly in step with the aims of the Victorian institutions that disseminated his ideas, Peters represented a direct challenge to the late twentieth-century cartographic profession and the ideological imperatives which he believed underpinned it.
By the end of the 1970s, the battle lines were clearly drawn. On one side, the cartographic profession and its institutions closed ranks to condemn Peters’s projection at a technical level, according to its own rules and methods of mapmaking. On the other, political and aid organizations embraced the projection’s explicitly social and ideological aims. While these organizations were understandably reluctant to engage in the debate over the projection’s technical mistakes, the cartographic profession was equally unwilling to acknowledge Peters’s insistence that all world maps (apart from his own) are partial and predisposed to subjective, ideological interests. The problem was compounded by the silence of many of Peters’s critics about their own vested institutional interests. Although Arthur Robinson’s technical criticisms of Peters’s projection were widely accepted, he failed to acknowledge that Peters’s world map posed the first serious challenge to his own projection, which in the 1970s was being distributed in atlases worldwide, thanks to US publishers. At the same time, as professional cartographers continued to attack Peters, they began to sound increasingly patrician, portraying the general public as a gullible mass, unable to read maps and see how Peters was deceiving them.
The gulf between Peters’s supporters and his detractors was caused by more than just an argument over the mathematical accuracy of map projections. The changing political climate of the 1960s, exemplified by the political protests that took place in France in May 1968, represented among many other things a radical reassessment of the status of the humanities and social sciences within society. While subjects like history and philosophy were leading the way in criticizing established political orthodoxy, others that were deeply embedded in social policy and state organization, like geography, were understandably more reluctant to react to such changes. Standing on the margins of geography, politically active individuals like Peters were able to provide a version of cartography in step with the times, more radical than its leading practitioners, many of whom had vested political and institutional interests in upholding the political status quo.
Peters’s rhetoric also chimed with the political debates of the early 1970s. There was a growing political awareness of the need to address inequality in response to the widening economic and political gap between the developed Western world and the developing southern world. In the early 1970s the World Bank estimated that 800 million people in the developing world were living in absolute poverty, with only 40 per cent in the same region able to secure the most basic necessities of life. The Brandt Report highlighted the gulf between the developed north and the developing south: it demanded that an ‘action programme must be launched comprising of emergency and longer-term measures, to assist the poverty belts of Africa and Asia and particularly the least developed countries’. The report’s authors had a vested interes
t in addressing the problem, arguing that ‘whatever their differences and however profound, there is a mutuality of interests between North and South. The fate of both is intimately connected.’ It called for a wholescale transfer of funds from the former to the latter, representing 0.7 per cent of the GDP of the countries involved, rising to 1 per cent by 2000 (neither figure was met).47
The developed north was not without its own problems: the 1970s witnessed a fall in economic growth of nearly 50 per cent from the 1960s, and by the end of the decade the thirty-four developed countries that made up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) were experiencing inflation, recession and cumulative unemployment of 18 million people. The United States was also experiencing what the economist Paul Krugman has called ‘the great divergence’ in economic and political inequality. Although average American workers began to double their output, they suffered a simultaneous decline in wages, while the top 0.1 per cent of American society became seven times richer during the course of the second half of the twentieth century. This led to income inequality higher than at any time since the 1920s, which, according to Krugman, has been responsible for the subsequent polarization of American political culture.48
Few geographers were equipped to acknowledge these complex but profound levels of global inequality, but Peters was different. Having lived under the iniquities of both Nazism and the Stalinist regime of the German Democratic Republic, he was well placed to voice the rhetoric of inequality, and to propose equality as a virtue. Geography could play a role in tackling inequality, and even expressing its opposite on a map.
The late 1970s also saw a shift in the study of geography and the history of cartography. Philosophers like Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre had already started to ask basic questions about how we understand and live within space. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (first published in French in 1958) alerted readers to how the most intimate phenomena of spaces – attics, cellars – shaped our lives (as well as our dreams); Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) took a more Marxist approach to explain how the creation of our public environments helped to enable (or constrain) personal identity. Others soon followed in arguing that space had a history. Within geography and the history of cartography, one of the most important advocates of this new approach was the English scholar J. B. Harley. Having trained in the traditional, positivist approach to mapmaking, and published extensively on the history of the English Ordnance Survey throughout the 1970s, Harley performed a remarkable volte-face in the early 1980s. Having digested the work of Bachelard, Lefebvre and other influential French thinkers including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Harley published a series of ground-breaking articles which called for a complete reconsideration of the historical role of maps. In one of his most influential articles, published in 1989, entitled ‘Deconstructing the Map’, Harley voiced his ‘frustration with many of the academic cartographers of today, who operate in a tunnel created by their own technologies without reference to the social world’. Claiming that ‘maps are too important to be left to cartographers alone’, he argued that ‘we should encourage an epistemological shift in the way we interpret the nature of cartography’.49
Harley claimed that ‘from at least the seventeenth century onward, European map-makers and map users have increasingly promoted a standard scientific model of knowledge and cognition’. He went on:
The object of mapping is to produce a ‘correct’ relational model of the terrain. Its assumptions are that the objects in the world to be mapped are real and objective, and that they enjoy an existence independent of the cartographer; that their reality can be expressed in mathematical terms; that systematic observation and measurement offer the only route to cartographic truth; and that this truth can be independently verified.
This was indeed the prevailing view of mapmaking, an Enlightenment belief in the transparent, objective reality of the map. As a description of cartographic practice, Harley’s account would undoubtedly have been accepted by both Arno Peters and his most vociferous critics.
But Harley went further. He invited his readers to ‘pick a printed or manuscript map from the drawer almost at random’. What stands out ‘is the unfailing way its text is as much a commentary on the social structure of a particular nation or place as it is on its topography. The map-maker is often as busy recording the contours of feudalism, the shape of a religious hierarchy, or the steps in the tiers of social class, as the topography of the physical and human landscape.’ Harley’s contention was not, as many of his critics claimed, that all maps lie, but that they contained historical conventions and social pressures that produced what he called a ‘subliminal geometry’.
Coming from such a respected member of the cartographic profession, Harley’s arguments for what he would later call ‘the new nature of maps’ marked a sea-change in the understanding of cartography. The impact on geography’s understanding of itself as an academic discipline was soon affected by Harley’s work, as it began to reflect on its own historical involvement in the endorsement of the ideologies of nationalism and imperialism.50 However, practising cartographers still remained sceptical about Harley’s adoption of Alfred Korzybski’s dictum that ‘the map is not the territory’.51
Matters came to a head in 1991. Harley had just completed another important article developing his earlier work by asking the question ‘Can there be a cartographic ethics?’ If maps can never be neutral, and are always subject to power, political authority and ideology, then is it possible for academic and professional cartographers to develop and sustain an ethical position in relation to their work? It was almost inevitable that Harley would invoke the controversy over the Peters projection to prove his point, although the consequences of doing so in this particular article only emphasized the problem he was trying to address. ‘The cause célèbre of the Peters projection’, wrote Harley, ‘led to an outburst of polemical righteousness in defence of “professional standards”.’ Nevertheless, as he went on:
Ethics demand honesty. The real issue in the Peters case is power: there is no doubt that Peters’ agenda was the empowerment of those nations of the world he felt had suffered an historic cartographic discrimination. But equally, for the cartographers, it was their power and ‘truth claims’ that were at stake. We can see them in a phenomenon well-known to sociologists of science, scrambling to close ranks to defend their established way of representing the world.
What followed was a startling accusation: ‘They are still closing ranks. I was invited to publish a version of this paper in the ACSM [American Congress on Surveying and Mapping] Bulletin. After submission I was informed by the editor that my remarks about the Peters projection were at variance with an official ACSM pronouncement on the subject and that it had been decided not to publish my essay!’52 Nearly two decades after the map’s release, the ACSM was still fighting a rearguard action by forbidding discussion of Peters’s world map that was anything other than negative.
But Harley was as much concerned with the question of institutional power as with competing claims over cartographic ‘accuracy’. The Peters projection was inaccurate by any standards: even its own author’s account of the history of cartography was highly selective and its claims to objectivity seriously exaggerated. As a cartographic historian Harley understood this, and knew that its longevity was limited. The broader problem that the controversy inspired was how to produce an ethical cartography once the profession accepted that all maps were partial and ideological representations of the space they purported to depict.
It is a telling sign of the nature of these debates over Peters that virtually none of those involved seriously discussed the ways in which his world map was understood or used by the many organizations that enthusiastically adopted it throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In a survey in 1987 of forty-two of the United Kingdom’s leading national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working primarily in Third World developmen
t issues, the geographer Peter Vujakovic found that twenty-five had adopted the Peters world map. Of this group, fourteen organizations admitted previously using world maps based on Mercator’s projection. When asked a series of questions about the use of world maps, nearly 90 per cent of the NGOs who responded agreed that mapmaking played a vital role in informing the public about Third World issues.53 Peters’s marketing campaign and the political arguments put forward for adopting his world map had apparently achieved remarkable success.
When the fourteen NGOs who adopted the Peters map were questioned more closely on the reasons for their choice, the results were more mixed. Asked to explain what they saw as the map’s advantages over others, 48 per cent cited its equal area projection; 36 per cent cited its distinctive appearance, believing that it ‘provokes reaction and thought’; 32 per cent cited its rejection of a ‘Eurocentric’ world view; 24 per cent claimed it provided ‘a better representation of the relative importance of the Third World countries’; and just 4 per cent thought the map was ‘a political statement in itself’. When questioned about the map’s disadvantages, the responses overwhelmingly fell into two categories: the public’s unfamiliarity with the map (32 per cent), and its distortion (32 per cent). It is noticeable that, apart from the map’s claims to equal-area representation and a non-Eurocentric perspective, none of Peters’s claims for it being a superior map projection are even mentioned. Nobody cited accuracy or objectivity as their reasons for adopting the map.
How then was the map used? Of the NGOs consulted, most admitted to using it as a logo for design purposes in published reports, documents and pamphlets, intending that the image’s unfamiliarity would provoke surprise and debate. Others used it for educating people about development issues. This involved using the map to identify the location of overseas projects by selecting limited areas from the larger global projection to create regional maps. In most of these cases, the graticule was removed, making any discussion of scale or proportion (central to Peters’s argument) irrelevant. Although such surveys are inevitably selective, they do reflect at least some understanding of Peters’s world map by the agencies involved in disseminating it in such vast numbers, but their responses suggest a limited level of cartographic literacy. The Peters world map’s ideological claims to enhance the geographical representation of developing countries simply offered a more attractive symbol of the political issues at stake for development agencies than any other cartographic projection currently available. The survey raises a question about the use of world maps, not just today, but throughout history: if mathematical accuracy and cartographic issues such as conformality or equal-area representation are of little interest to groups who use a world map, does anyone within the general public consider such questions in the world maps they use in their everyday lives?
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 49
