A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  As the IMW foundered, the British delegation proposed that a central bureau should run the project from the offices of the Ordnance Survey, with the Royal Geographical Society providing private funding ostensibly independent of politics. Few people were fooled; the initiative was supported by the Geographical Section of the General Staff (GSGS), otherwise known as MO4, part of the British government’s intelligence organization, responsible for gathering and producing military maps. As war was declared in 1914, the OS, with the support of the RGS and the GSGS, produced a series of 1:1,000,000 maps of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in support of the Allied war effort.8 The national and political differences that Penck hoped would be transcended in the map’s creation ultimately turned it into an instrument of warfare.

  After 1918, the project limped on, but Penck distanced himself from it, disillusioned by what he regarded as the political injustice of the Treaty of Versailles (which imposed its own cartographic divisions upon a defeated Germany). By 1925 the project’s central bureau reported that just 200 1:1,000,000 maps had been produced, and only 21 of them conformed to the original criteria agreed by the delegates at Paris in 1913.9 By 1939, only another 150 maps had been completed. With the outbreak of the Second World War the OS’s involvement in the IMW was effectively over. The RGS’s secretary Arthur Hinks concluded that the project’s international ethos was mistaken. ‘The moral seems to be’, he wrote, ‘that if you want a general map covering a continent, consistent in style, and available in quantity, then you must make it yourself, and whether you call it international or not is a matter of choice, or expediency.’10

  As the Second World War established the importance of military control of the skies, aeronautical charts were regarded as more important than the relatively large-scale maps produced under the auspices of the OS. The war also took its toll on the OS itself. In November 1940 the bombing of Southampton destroyed most of the OS’s offices and much of the material relating to the International Map. In 1949 those still involved recommended its transferral to the recently formed United Nations. The UN’s Charter already acknowledged that ‘accurate maps are a prerequisite to the proper development of the world’s resources . . . such maps facilitate international trade, promote safety of navigation . . . and provide information required for the study of measures of peaceful adjustment . . . and for the application of security measures’.11 At the thirteenth session of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), on 20 September 1951, Resolution 412 AII (XIII) was passed authorizing the transfer of the IMW’s Central Bureau to the Cartographic Office of the UN Secretariat,12 and in September 1953 the UN officially took control of the IMW. It inherited a project in disarray, with only 400 finished maps, a fraction of the number required to complete the project. The UN’s first published index map provided a global summary of what had been published, revised, republished, received, and what still needed to be mapped. It was chaotic, and what remained to be done was daunting.13

  As the Cold War intensified throughout the 1950s, it was obvious that the spirit of international cooperation that originally inspired the International Map was dead. In 1956 the USSR put forward a proposal to the ECOSOC for a new world map, based on the scale of 1:2,500,000. Not surprisingly, considering the UN’s investment in the IMW, the proposal was rejected, but, in a bleak irony, the Hungarian National Office of Lands and Mapping took up the project, with the support of the other Communist states behind the Iron Curtain and China. The first printed sheets were published in 1964, and in 1976 the entire map was exhibited for the first time in Moscow. It included 224 full and 39 overlapping sheets, and although it lacked the scale and detail of Penck’s original idea and achieved only limited circulation in Eastern Europe, it represented a Russian-sponsored attempt to show that the Soviet Bloc could match anything produced in the capitalist West.14

  Fig. 38 ‘Index Map Showing Status of Publication of the International One-millionth Map of the World’ (IMW), 1952.

  The UN tried to resuscitate the IMW throughout the 1960s, but to little effect, and leading cartographers lined up to castigate its tarnished international aspirations – including Arthur Robinson, who dismissed it as merely ‘cartographic wallpaper’.15 In 1989, the UN finally gave up and terminated the project. Less than a thousand maps were finished, and most were already obsolete. The world had moved on. The US government had already launched the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, just one of many state-funded organizations that would signal the birth of online geospatial applications and the death of the dream of an international state-funded world map based on global cooperation.

  The nineteenth-century values that inspired the IMW – scientific progress, imperial dominion, global trade and the authority of the nation state – ultimately destroyed this cartographic Tower of Babel. The contradiction of trying to create the map is that the time of its establishment got (or actually did not get) the world map it deserved. Its imperial and national demands of transparent international cooperation based on the assumed superiority of Western mapping methods were simply too high, and overwhelmed the project’s intellectual aspirations and scientific abilities. All the technical resources and state financial support available throughout the twentieth century could still not produce a standardized world map – and this was even before addressing the irresolvable dilemma of adopting a global map projection. Not only were Lewis Carroll’s and Borges’s tales of the 1:1 scale map pure fantasy, but so it would seem was the 1:1,000,000 map of the world.

  Today’s online geospatial applications show little appetite for revisiting such a project, despite Al Gore’s dream of a ‘digital earth’.16 In 2008 a Japanese-led initiative supported by the US and Japanese governments was launched in an attempt to fulfil the dream of the 1:1,000,000 map of the world digitally. It is called simply ‘Global Map’. The project’s website mission statement claims that the ‘Global Map is a platform for people to learn about the present state of the earth and take a broad view of the earth for the future’.17 The fact that most people reading this book have never even heard of ‘Global Map’ tells you all you need to know about its impact. Even the engineers at Google Earth concede that their dream of a uniform virtual online world map is impossible. Their reason is simple: they want to retain the globe’s national, local and linguistic diversity that the International Map wanted to transcend, because in today’s global economy, diversity and difference are potentially profitable. Nobody wants to buy a product linked to a map that shows their local area labelled in a foreign language and covered in unfamiliar symbols.

  For more than 3,000 years humanity has dreamt of creating a universally accepted map of the world, ever since the anonymous maker of the Babylonian map of the world first shaped his tablet out of the earth’s clay. Today, it still seems an idealistic fantasy, and will always be doomed by the impossibility of creating a commonly accepted, global projection of the earth. Despite the claims of Google Earth, will it ever be possible, or even desirable, to create what Abraham Ortelius desired, a comprehensive and universally accepted map the whole earth that can act as the omniscient eye of history?

  From a practical point of view, surveyors and geodesists would probably answer yes, but they would need to provide convincing answers as to why such a project would be necessary, notwithstanding the technical problems of projection, scale and execution. Penck never provided one sufficient to withstand the intemperate politics of the twentieth century, and the ineffectiveness of the more recent ‘Global Map’ suggests that its vaguely environmental mission statement is not the answer either. What all the maps discussed in this book have shown is that their proposal about how to see the world emanates from a particular vision of it, something which both Penck and the ‘Global Map’ lack. When the sheer scale of implementing such a project still requires some form of state or corporate funding, it is difficult to imagine it could escape the perennial political or commercial manipulation that
has so often tried to impose a single image upon the sheer variety of the earth and its people.

  But to answer no appears to endorse a partial vision that turns its back on both the inevitability of globalization and the possibility of celebrating a common international humanity through geography. Virtually all twelve maps discussed in this book have successfully struggled with such a partial global vision of the world. Every culture has a specific way of seeing and representing its world through maps, and this is as true for Google Earth as it is for the Hereford mappamundi and the Kangnido world map. Perhaps the answer is less an unqualified no, and more a sceptical yes. There will always be maps of the world, and their technology and appearance at some point in the future will make the world map in a modern atlas, and even Google Earth’s home page, seem as quaint and unfamiliar as the Babylonian world map. But they will also inevitably pursue a particular agenda, insist on a certain geographical interpretation at the expense of possible alternatives, and ultimately define the earth in one way rather than another. But they certainly will not show the world ‘as it really is’, because that cannot be represented. There is simply no such thing as an accurate map of the world, and there never will be. The paradox is that we can never know the world without a map, nor definitively represent it with one.

  1. The earliest known world map: the Babylonian world map, from Sippar, southern Iraq, c. 700-500 BC.

  2. The world as a theatre: the frontispiece to Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570).

  3. The world map from one of the earliest known copies of Ptolemy’s Geography, written in Greek, thirteenth century. © 2012 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Urb. gr. 82, ff. 60v-61r)

  4a. A nineteenth-century facsimile of the Peutinger map (c. 1300), showing (from left to right) England, France and the Alps, and North Africa running along the bottom.

  4b. The easternmost limits of the Roman world on the Peutinger map: Iran, Iraq, India and Korea.

  5. Twelfth-century Greek, Arab and Latin scribes working alongside each other in the chancery of King Roger II of Sicily.

  6. The circular world map from a sixteenth-century copy of the Entertainment (1154), showing the convergence of Latin and Arabic geographical knowledge.

  7. diagram for a world map, in ‘Marvels of the Seven Climates to the End of Habitation’ (tenth century), with a diagrammatic map showing the earth’s seven climates.

  8. Ibn Hawqal’s world map (1086), oriented with south at the top.

  9. The circular world map from the anonymous Book of Curiosities, almost identical to the world map found in Entertainment.

  10. The unique rectangular world map from the Book of Curiosities, from a thirteenth-century copy, oriented with south at the top and with a scale bar.

  11. A reconstruction of the world map combining the seventy regional maps drawn in Entertainment.

  12a. The Hereford mappamundi (c. 1300), with east at the top.

  12b. Christ flanked by angels leading people to heaven and hell.

  12c. The Roman emperor Augustus Caesar sending consuls to survey the earth. The British Isles are shown on the map directly opposite him.

  12d. A rider gazes up at Africa and its ‘monstrous’ races, next to the words ‘Go ahead’.

  13. Zonal map from Macrobius’ Commentary on Scipio’s Dream (ninth century), showing the earth divided into temperate, frozen and ‘torrid’ zones.

  14. A twelfth-century world map illustrating Isidore’s Etymologies. Despite a diameter of just 26 centimetres, it bears a striking resemblance to the Hereford mappamundi.

  15. The Sawley map: the earliest known English mappamundi (1190), discovered in a Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire.

  16. The Kangnido map (1470), the earliest known East Asian map to show the whole world, Europe, and Korea.

  17. Detail of the Korean peninsula from the Kangnido map, showing key administrative and military sites.

  18. Copy of an official map of Korea by (1390–1475), showing the influence of geomantic mapping, with colour-coded ‘cosmic energy’ flowing through the river systems (coloured blue) and mountain ranges (green), with district seats given other distinctive colours according to their provinces.

  19. America’s birth certificate: Martin Waldseemüller’s map of the world (1507), the first to name and show America as a separate continent, bought by the US Library of Congress in 2003 for $10 million.

  20. Nicolo Caveri’s world chart (c. 1504–5), showing the new discoveries of the time, but still indebted to the mappamundi tradition, with Jerusalem at its centre.

  21. The earliest world map from Ptolemy’s Geography in Latin (early fifteenth century), part of the European Renaissance’s ‘rediscovery’ of classical learning. © 2012 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Cod. VAT. Lat. 5698)

  22. A change of mind? Martin Waldseemüller’s map from his 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, where ‘America’ has been replaced by ‘Terra incognita’.

  23. A world map attributed to Waldseemüller showing ‘America’ but (according to Henry N. Stevens) dated to 1506. Is this the first map to name the continent?

  24. Henricus Martellus’s world map (c. 1489). The discovery of the Cape of Good Hope breaches the Ptolemaic boundaries of the classical world map.

  25. The Cantino Planisphere (1502), smuggled out of Lisbon by an Italian spy eager to learn about Portugal’s commercially lucrative discoveries.

  26. The earliest known terrestrial globe, made by Martin Behaim in 1492. Its underestimation of the size of the earth inspired Columbus and Magellan to embark on their eastward voyages.

  27. Antonio Pigafetta’s map of the Moluccas (1521), based on his first-hand experience of the spice-rich islands.

  28. Nuño García’s chart of the Moluccas (c. 1522), showing the islands in the Castilian half of the globe, east of the red dividing line agreed at Tordesillas (1494) which runs through Sumatra, where it intersects with the Equator.

  29. Bernard van Orley’s remarkable tapestry ‘Earth under the Protection of Jupiter and Juno’ (1525), showing the Portuguese King John and his Habsburg wife Catherine, and the extent of the king’s seaborne empire.

  30. Diogo Ribeiro’s world map (1525), the first in a series supporting the Castilian claim to the Moluccas (visible in both the far left- and right-hand corners), and offering a new outline of the North American coastline.

  31. Ribeiro’s third, and greatest, world map (1529), placing the Moluccas (again visible in both the far left- and right-hand corners) within the Castilian half of the globe in a brilliant act of cartographic manipulation. © 2012 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Borg. Carte. Naut. III)

  32. Gerard Mercator’s map of the Holy Land (1538), showing surprising similarities to maps made by Luther’s supporters.

  33. Gerard Mercator’s incomplete wall map of Flanders (1539-40), a hasty attempt to head off a Habsburg occupation of Ghent in 1540, with unfinished sections.

  34. Mercator’s first attempt at mapping the world (1538). The double cordiform (‘heart-shaped’) projection was only one of many alternatives available to him.

  35. Oronce Finé’s double cordiform world map (1531), copied by Mercator. Finé and many other mapmakers with occult and reformed religious beliefs chose this projection.

  36. Gerard Mercator’s map of the world on his famous 1569 projection.

  37. The floor of Amsterdam’s Town Hall with three inlaid hemispheres (1655), based on Joan Blaeu’s world map (1648).

  38. Frontispiece to Joan Blaeu’s Atlas maior (1662).

  39. Petrus Plancius’s map of the Moluccas (1592), showing the Dutch interest in the region’s trading commodities: nutmeg, cloves and sandalwood are depicted in the foreground.

  40. Joan Blaeu’s world map (1648), which celebrates the independence of the Dutch Republic and the global ambition of its East India Company. It also provides the first world
map based on a heliocentric solar system. Just below the map’s title, above where the hemispheres meet, is a diagram of the solar system labelled ‘Hypothesis Copernicana’, showing the earth revolving round the sun.