Mapping History

My interest in wayfinding and maps led me to Jerry Brotton’s A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012).

            It’s a basic human impulse to try to make some order out of our immediate surroundings as well as “the vast, apparently limitless space of the known world.” We do it with myth and ritual, but we also create the abstract representations of space that are maps. Maps confer authority on their makers. These matters Jerry Brotton establishes in the first couple of pages of his introduction. As soon as we have marks made by humans, he says, we have maps. The oldest world map we have is a 2,500-year-old clay tablet showing Babylon as the center of the world bisected by the Euphrates.

            Maps, says Brotton, express an individual or a cultural world view, and always have a purpose: “A map always manages the reality it tries to show.” He lays out the features of every map that represent decisions by the mapmaker. One is scale, or the proportion of map piece to world piece. Another is perspective, or the point of view from which the mapmaker looks. It is almost always egocentric, says Brotton; like the Babylonian, we end to put ourselves in the center, either because we think our town or country is the center, or because that’s just where we are when we are making the map. Orientation is another feature that varies, because not every map uses our convention of putting north at the top. The most complex feature of a world map is projection. Since the time of Ptolemy’s Geography, around 150AD, those who made world maps have realized that transposing the continents from a globe to a flat map always makes for distortion. The method one uses in making this transposition is called projection, and there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ways to do it.

            Brotton does not argue that maps, though they have acquired more precision on account of scientific and technological advances, have therefore become more accurate or objective through history, though it is generally true that their makers have usually pushed those claims. His chapter titles reflect his conviction that “each map…encapsulates a particular idea or issue that both motivated its creation and captured its contemporaries’ understanding of the world, from science, politics, religion and empire to nationalism, trade and globalization.”

            Brotton keeps his topics interesting and does, despite the outrageous claim of the title, manage to get in a great deal of world history in his 450 pages. His style is generally lucid and readable, though he is very fond of split infinitives, and more than once a long sentence gets out of his control and ceases to cohere. Not all of his maps are world maps, and not all of his maps are even maps—Ptolemy’s Geography may or may not have had any maps attached to it, and Brotton’s last example, Google Earth, is a huge collection of geographical information in digital form, with a sophisticated search engine to access it.

            The dullest chapter in the book is the first one, “Science: Ptolemy’s Geography, c. AD150.” But it’s a necessary chapter, not just because Ptolemy’s influence is felt for the next two millennia of mapmaking, but because it establishes so many of the practical problems of the game. Claudius Ptolemy, after completing his Almagest in ~147, turned his attention from the heavens to earth and complied his Geography ~150AD. It incorporated the thinking of Eratosthenes, Aristotle’s Meteorologica ~350BC, and other ancient Greek as well as Hellenistic contributions to the subject up to Strabo’s Geography in about 10AD. Ptolemy includes 8,000 cities and other places located by latitude and longitude, which he calculated by getting the parallels of latitude through astronomical observation of the longest day at given locations from the equator to as far toward the poles as he could find information. Longitude he measured using he sun as clock: all places in the same meridian of longitude will have local noon at the same time. Ptolemy’s is the first rationalized method to establish a grid of latitude and longitude—called a graticule—upon which to locate the cities, mountains, coastlines, and other features of a map. We don’t know whether he actually ever drew a world map, but he not only established a grounding with his graticule; he also understood the difficulties of representing the land and water shapes of the spherical earth on a flat map, and he proposed several projections to accomplish it, including the conical, with straight meridians, and another, in which both parallels and meridians would be curved.

            Things pick up with “Exchange: Al-Idrisi, AD1154.” In Palermo in 1154, working in the chancery of the Norman King of Sicily Roger II, in an era of convivencia, or a time when Catholics, Jews, and Muslims lived together in peace, al-Sharif al-Idrisi completed his Kitab-nuzhat al-mushtaq, or Book of Enertainment for One Who Longs to Travel the World. He used Ptolemy and Paulus Orosius, an early Christian religious scholar, but he also called on a tradition of Muslim mapmaking beginning with the Abassid Caliphate in AD750. The Entertainment contained seventy regional maps, but a silver world map  combining them, now lost, was constructed in Roger’s palace. The book is not doctrinal or political; it’s as near to empirical as one could have got then and there, combining Greek, Latin, and Arab scholarship. The map we get if we put the seventy regional maps together has no graticule but is divided into seven climate zones, an idea that goes back to Arisotle, is elaborated in Ptolemy, and shows up in the Arab tradition. The map is oriented with south at the top—for Muslims in the north that was the qibla or sacred direction of Mecca.

            Nothing could be more different from al-Idrisi than the Hereford map Brotton describes in “Faith: Hereford Mappamundi, c. 1300.” The map that’s in the Hereford Cathedral annex, in the Marches, the border country between England and Wales, is painted on an animal skin and is about five by four feet, oriented with east at the top, with no graticule or climate zones. The map is a faith-based account not only of geography known and (mostly) unknown but of geography subjected to biblical history, a faith-based account of space and time, with Jerusalem at its center and biblical events throughout, with judgment at the top.

            In 1389, the Korean military commander overthrows the Koryo dynasty and establishes the new Chosun dynasty with himself as king, one whose neo-Confucian attention to practical rule replaced the spiritual, esoteric Buddhism of the former regime. In this spirit he commissions a map, discussed in “Empire: Kangnido World Map, 1402.” The Ryoku University copy of the Kangnido Map is on silk, about seven by five and a half feet, with north at the top and China, not Korea, the central and most prominent feature. The Korean peninsula is shown in great detail, however. Both al-Idrisi’s and Ptolemy’s influences are apparent, though the map has no graticule or climatic divisions. No cosmographic or religious element inform the map. Chines influence is obvious in China’s prominent placement and in orienting the map with north at the top (the Emperor speaks facing south, and his subjects face north to hear him).

            The first map, probably, that names the new continent “America” from the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, is discussed in “Discovery: Martin Waldseemüller, World Map, 1507.” The Waldseemüller map has north at the top, depicts coastlines and land masses in a way recognizable to us, has a graticule, and is a woodcut impression made with the new technology of printing. Printed with it in a separate published part were gores to construct a small globe. The whole world map is in twelve pages; assembled it is four by eight feet, using Ptolemy’s second projection, with horizontal parallels as circular arcs, the central meridian a straight line, the others curving increasingly toward it, and the whole a heart-shaped image.

            In 1494, at Tordesillas, the Spaniards and Portuguese divided the world between them with a line several hundred miles west of the Cape Verde  Islands. But, as Brotton points out in “Globalism: Diogo Ribeiro, World Map, 1529,” they neglected to specify exactly where that line fell on the other side of the globe. The Moluccas—the Spice Islands—were at stake, and at further negotiations in the 1520s, one of the Spanish negotiators was Diogo Ribeiro, a Portuguese. His maps were used in the debates, countering maps drawn by the Portuguese, but Ribeiro was well acquainted with information from Magellan’s voyages and had an advantage. Spain’s right to the Moluccas was ceded, but Charles V eventually sold it to the Portuguese.

            Gerard Mercator, the first to call a collection of maps an atlas, made woodcut maps obsolete with copperplate maps, and is discussed in “Toleration: Gerard Mercator, World Map, 1569.” Mercator’s 1569 map, 6 by 4 feet, uses a projection that makes North America larger than Europe and Asia together, Europe twice its true area, and Africa and Southeast Asia reduced in area. The North Pole is a large circular land mass in an inset map of the pole. Mercator knew that showing the shape of continents as they appear on a globe, keeping longitudes and latitudes consistent as well as distances and sizes of continents—all this was impossible to do at once on a flat map. The cylindrical projection increases the degrees of latitude toward the poles and lengthens the parallels with reference to the equator in order to achieve conformality, or the maintenance of accurate angular relations at any point on the map, all in order to make straight line, constant bearing navigation possible.

            In “Money: Joan Blaeu, Atlas maior, 1662,” Brotton begins with the three globes, celestial and terrestrial, depicted in the marble floor of the People’s Hall of the Amsterdam Town Hall, designed by Joan Blaeu and signaling the new Dutch political and commercial power in Europe. Blaeu was the first to incorporate Copernican heliocentric theory into a map of the world (1648) and the solar system, which also celebrated the independence of the Dutch Republic, whose joint-stock East India Company was the first international trading organization free of any monarchical control, and Joan Blaeu was its official cartographer. Blaeu’s great achievement was his Atlas maior in 1662, thousands of pages in a dozen large volumes.

            The rise of the Cassini dynasty of cartographers is told in “Nation: The Cassini Family, Map of France, 1793,” and with it the story of  new kind of map, based on surveys using modern scientific principles, with teams of surveyors who first measured meridian lines by using standard length measures, then triangulated from this bse onto points outside the line to precisely calculate distances. An equatorial expedition using these methods tackled the disagreement about the earth’s shape—Descartes’ prolate ellipsoid or Newton’s oblate spheroid—and confirmed tha Newton was correct. Several generations of Cassinis proposed ever more precise maps of France, but wars and the Revolution kept the project from being completely realized. The Cassinis’ methods inspired the British Ordnance Survey started in 1784 and demonstrated that the accuracy of maps is best seen as a work in progress, of continual refinement, never completed. Its methods, moreover, only really work for regional mapping; when extrapolated to large areas the problem of projection comes in, because accurate shapes and accurate distances can’t be achieved together when the round earth gets depicted on a flat map.

            Various geographical societies, often quasi-official and semi-commercial, were established in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, lithography was replacing copperplate as copperplate had replaced woodcut reproduction. The century saw the introduction of more than 50 new map projections. Cosmography gave way to cartography. Thematic maps such as William Smith’s 1815 The Strata of England became common. In “Geopolitics: Halford Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ 1904,” Brotton traces Mackinder’s career as geographer and founder of the London School of Economics, his climbing of Mount Kenya because, because, as he said, “it was still necessary at that time for me to prove that I could explore” in order to be seen as the complete geographer. His map of Kenya after his return was one he “classic examples of scientific imperial mapmaking” in which he named features for himself and for those he wished to impress. The world map illustrating his talk, “The Natural Seats of Power,” showed “The Geographical Pivot of History” adjoining Europe: the whole Russian-Asian region as the greatest threat to British imperialism. Brotton says Mackinder defined geopolitics as a new field of study.

            “Equality: The Peters Projection, 1973” talks about Arno Peters’s claim that his world map finally reversed a 400-year-old prejudice in favor of white men, showing the true comparative areas of South America and Africa versus North America and Europe. His claims were accepted and his map used by Oxfam, the British Council of Churches, and the United Nations, as well as various NGOs. Cartographers attacked the map, including Arthur Robinson, who in 1961 had produced his “orthophanic” projection of the earth (his colleague John Snyder called it “the best combination of distortions”) in a map that was used by Rand McNally, the National Geographic Society, and many others, eventually becoming more popular than Mercator and “the most widely distributed map of the world.” Peters’s projection got a lot wrong and was not an “equal area” projection at all. But he made his point that world maps are “shaped by their social and political times” and are never neutral or “scientifically accurate” because they have to choose what to distort to get a global panorama onto a flat map. Peters is also right that Mercator makes Europe look larger than South America (real scale 3:5.6) and North America larger than Africa (real scale 6:9.7).

            The final chapter is “Information: Google Earth, 2012,” and of course it is not strictly speaking a map but rather ten petabytes of geographic information that can be used to make a sort of map of parts of the world, with or without a satellite photo overlay, with Google selecting the kinds of features the map will have and their prominence. Critics say that Google’s collection of data from many sources infringes copyrights, violates privacy, and compromises the security of countries. Brotton traces the digitizing history that made this happen, that made information “fungible” by turning it all into ones and zeroes or on and off switches. The first digital map application was Keyhole’s Earthviewer in 2001. Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and had its first version of its free downloadable Google Earth out the next year. Then came Google Maps. The applications allow Google to locate customers and offer their adbuyers’ wares to them according to proximity of taste and space. Google is “part of a long…cartographic tradition of mapping geography onto commerce” that includes many of the mapmakers talked about in this book. The difference is that all those previous maps were transparent, whereas Google codes are proprietary and secret, and we’ve never before had “the possibility of a monopoly of…geographical information.”

            Brotton concludes by saying that maps “offer a proposal about the world, rather than just a reflection of it,” and each of them “emerges from a particular culture’s prevailing assumptions and preoccupations.” There will never be a universally accepted, standardized map of the world,” and “we must always make compromises when we choose out partial maps” which “inevitable pursue a particular agenda.”