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By Uri Friedman

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 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 globebased 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)

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 first 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 Pacific 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)

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 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 in the east-oriented map is time, not space, and
specifically 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 crucifix, 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 astronomers led by Kwon
Kun, is that north is at top. "It's strange because the first 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 notes, it is "America's birth certificate"a distinction that prompted
the Library of Congress to buy it from a German prince for $10 million. It is the first map to recognize
the Pacific Ocean and the separate continent of "America," which Waldseemuller named in honor of
the then-still-living Amerigo Vespucci, who identified 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 lands in two).
After Ferdinand Magellan's expedition circumnavigated the globe for the first time in 1522, Ribeiro,

working for the Spanish crown, placed the "Spice Islands," inaccurately, just inside the Spanish half of
his seemingly scientific 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 first 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 influential figure in the history of
mapmaking. The Flemish-German cartographer tried "on a flat 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 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 conflicts 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 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 personifications of the five 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

Beginning under Louis XIV, four generations of the Cassini family presided over the first 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 believes this ideathat control of certain pivotal
regions can translate into international hegemonyhas influenced figures 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 areahence 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 amplified these by committing serious mathematical errors.
"No map is any better or worse than any other map," Brotton says. "It's just about what agenda it
pursues."
The West Wing enshrined the Peters Projection in pop culture during an episode in which the
fictitious 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.
Gall--Peters Projection

12. Virtual Mapping: Google Earth (2005)

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 offers 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.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/12-maps-that-changed-the-world
/282666/
Copyright 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.