A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Less than six months after the release of the Apollo 17 earth photographs, a world map was unveiled in Germany that claimed to turn its back on the selective political mapmaking of the twentieth century and to present an image of the world that promised equality to all nations. In May 1973, the German historian Arno Peters (1916–2002) called a press conference in Bonn, then capital of the Federal Republic of West Germany. In front of an assembled gathering of 350 international reporters, Peters announced a new map of the world based on what he called the Peters Projection. It was an immediate sensation, and it quickly made international front-page news. In the United Kingdom, the Guardian newspaper ran a story entitled ‘Dr Peters’ Brave New World’, heralding the new map and its mathematical projection as ‘the most honest projection of the world yet devised’.8 Harper’s Magazine even went as far as to run an article on Peters’s projection entitled ‘The Real World’.9 For those who first saw the map in 1973, its novelty lay in its appearance. To those used to Mercator’s projection, the northern continents appeared radically reduced in size, while Africa and South America took on the appearance of enormous teardrops sliding down towards Antarctica, or as one reviewer infamously put it, ‘the landmasses are somewhat reminiscent of wet, ragged, long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle’.10

  Peters claimed that his new world map offered the best alternative to the 400-year-old hegemony of Mercator’s 1569 projection, and the supposedly ‘Eurocentric’ assumptions that lay behind it. In unveiling his map, Peters believed that the ‘usual’ map of the world by his German-speaking forebear, with which his audience were so familiar, ‘presents a fully false picture particularly regarding the non-white-peopled lands’, arguing that ‘it over-values the white man and distorts the picture of the world to the advantage of the colonial masters of the time’. In explaining the technical innovations of his own map, Peters pointed out that Mercator put the equator nearly two-thirds of the way down his map, effectively placing Europe at its centre. On Mercator’s projection the land masses were subject to distortion, leading to an inaccurate increase in the size of Europe and the ‘developed’ world and a subsequent decrease in the size of what Peters called ‘the third world’, in particular Africa and South America. Peters insisted that his own map provided what he called an ‘equal area’ projection that accurately retained the ‘correct’ dimensions of countries and continents according to their size and area. It therefore rectified what he regarded as the Eurocentric prejudice of Mercator and offered ‘equality’ to all nations across the globe.11

  The impact of Peters’s projection and his attack on Mercator was extraordinary. Over the next two decades it became one of the most popular and bestselling world maps of all time, rivalling the American cartographer Arthur Robinson’s 1961 projection reproduced in the international bestselling Rand McNally and National Geographic Society’s world atlases, and even Mercator’s ubiquitous projection. In 1980 it adorned the cover of the Brandt Report, and in 1983 it appeared in English for the first time, in a special issue of the global development magazine New Internationalist. Praising what it called a ‘remarkable new map’, the magazine reproduced Peters’s claims that Mercator’s map ‘shows the ex-European colonies as relatively small and peripheral’, while his own map ‘shows countries according to their true scale’, which, it believed, ‘makes a dramatic difference to the portrayal of the Third World’.12

  In the same year the British Council of Churches distributed thousands of copies of the map, which was also endorsed by OXFAM, Action Aid and more than twenty other agencies and organizations. Even the papacy praised its progressive agenda. But the United Nations was the most passionate advocate of Peters’s map. UNESCO (the Educational, Scientific and Cultural wing of the organization) adopted it, and UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) issued an estimated 60 million copies of the map under the slogan ‘New Dimensions, Fair Conditions’. The map was so successful that Peters issued a manifesto in German and English outlining his approach. It was published in English in 1983 as The New Cartography, and was soon followed in 1989 by The Peters Atlas of the World. More than 80 million copies of the map have probably now been distributed across the world.13

  But if the media and progressive political and religious organizations quickly accepted the map and Peters’s cartographic methods, the scholarly community reacted with horror and disdain. Geographers and practising cartographers queued up to launch a bitter and sustained attack. The projection’s claims to greater ‘accuracy’, they countered, were inaccurate: Peters, untrained in cartography, lacked an understanding of the basic principles of map projection; as a target, Mercator was a straw man, his influence unnecessarily overstated; Peters’s skilful marketing of his map and the subsequent atlas looked like someone cynically exploiting an ignorant public to promote his own personal and political ends.

  This response, even by academic standards, was vicious. In one of the first English language reviews of Peters’s projection, published in 1974, the British geographer Derek Maling condemned it as ‘a remarkable act of sophism and cartographic deception’.14 Another British geographer, Norman Pye, dismissed the publication of Peters’s Atlas as ‘absurd’, and complained that ‘only the cartographically naïve will be deceived and fail to be exasperated by the pretentious and misleading claims made for the atlas by the author’.15 Reviewing The New Cartography, the prominent British cartographer H. A. G. Lewis wrote that ‘[h]aving read this book many times in German and in English, I still marvel that the author, any author, could write such nonsense’.16

  The most damning review of Peters’s projection came from Arthur Robinson. In 1961 Robinson had created a new projection with the explicit aim of offering a compromise between conformal and equal-area projections. He used evenly spaced, curving meridians which did not converge onto a single point, limiting distortion at the poles, which allowed for a relatively realistic representation of the whole earth as a globe. The projection is also known as orthophanic (from the French for ‘correct speaking’), although Robinson’s colleague John Snyder captured its inherent compromises when he described it as providing ‘the best combination of distortions’.17 Nevertheless, with the backing of the Rand McNally publishing house and the National Geographic Society, millions of copies of the projection were circulated, and it finally eclipsed Mercator’s as the most popular and widely distributed map of the world. Reviewing Peters’s work in 1985, Robinson was unsparing in his attack on his German rival. The New Cartography was ‘a cleverly contrived, cunningly deceptive attack’ on the discipline of cartography, but its method was ‘illogical and erroneous’, ‘absurd’, ‘the arguments spurious and in some instances just plain wrong’. Echoing Lewis’s review, Robinson concluded that ‘[i]t is difficult to imagine how anyone who claims to be a student of cartography can write such things’.18

  Even in Germany, the attacks continued. Following the release of Peters’s projection in 1973, the German Cartographical Society felt compelled to issue a statement condemning it. ‘In the interests of truthfulness and of pure scientific discussion’, the society decided to intervene in what it called ‘the continuing polemic propaganda by the historian Dr Arno Peters’. Invoking ‘the mathematical proof that the projection of a spherical surface to a plane surface is not possible without distortions and imperfections’, the society’s statement went on: ‘If Mr Peters, in the “catalogue of world map qualities” produced by him, maintains that his world map possesses only positive qualities and no shortcomings, then this contradicts the findings of mathematical cartography and arouses doubts regarding the author’s objectivity and the usefulness of his catalogue.’ Having systematically dismantled most of Peters’s claims, the statement concluded, ‘the Peters map conveys a distorted view of the world. It is by no means a modern map and completely fails to convey the manifold global, economic and political relationships of our times!’19

  Despite such ferocious responses, Peter
s’s supporters continued to champion the map through government and aid organizations. By 1977 the West German government’s Press and Information Office were circulating press releases endorsing Peters’s new map, much to the consternation of many cartographers. When one of the releases was published in the bulletin of the American Congress of Surveying and Mapping (ACSM), its members responded in November 1977 with an article entitled ‘American Cartographers Vehemently Denounce German Historian’s Projection’. The article was even more intemperate than the response of the German Society. Written by Arthur Robinson and John Snyder, two of the organization’s most distinguished members, it savaged Peters as having little ‘good sense’, and his projection, which was ‘ridiculous and insulting to dozens of other inventors’ of more valid map projections.20

  From the academic response to Peters’s map, it would be easy to say that he created a flawed projection, and that his conclusions were wrong. But it is never that simple with maps. Both sides in the controversy claimed that objective truth was on their side, but invariably this objectivity quickly unravelled to disclose more subjective beliefs and vested personal and institutional interests. Gradually the debate turned into a deeper reflection on the nature of mapmaking. Were there established criteria for assessing world maps, and, if so, who should establish them? What happened when a map was accepted by the public at large but rejected by the cartographic profession, and what did this say about people’s ability to read (or misread) maps? What was an ‘accurate’ map of the world, and what was the role of maps in society?

  Initially, such questions were ignored in the professional condemnation of Peters’s projection because most technically trained cartographers were so busy falling over themselves to dismiss the projection as ‘bad’ and Peters’s claims as ‘wrong’. There was indeed much to criticize. Of greatest concern was that Peters seems to have simply got his calculations wrong when drawing up his world map. Having measured the graticule on Peters’s projection, one of his earliest critics noticed that his parallels were out by up to 4 millimetres, which on a global scale was a serious distortion, and meant that, technically speaking, ‘Peters’ projection is not equal area’.21 Peters’s claim that scale and distance were correctly represented on his projection was also mathematically impossible, as any plane map that attempts to replicate the distances between two points on the globe must adopt a scale relative to the curvature of the earth’s surface. The argument that his projection dramatically reduced territorial distortion and correctly represented those countries colonized by the European powers was also not borne out by closer inspection. Reviewers claimed that on his map Nigeria and Chad both appeared twice as long as they should be, while Indonesia was represented at twice its north–south height and half its actual breadth east to west.22 These were serious mistakes, but, when challenged, Peters stuck to his calculations, and refused to accept he had made any. Ironically, the distortions of shape which affected his projection were at their greatest in Africa and South America, two of the continents he argued suffered so greatly from European ‘misrepresentation’. In contrast, regions predominantly covering the middle latitudes, including most of North America and Europe, suffered very little distortion. These errors and contradictions were only compounded with the subsequent publication of The Peters Atlas of the World in English in 1989. Here Peters altered his standard parallels, and also contradicted his claim to use one universal projection for every regional map: in his polar maps he adopted two of the more traditional projections (including Mercator’s) which had been summarily dismissed in his New Cartography.

  As well as exaggerating his map’s accuracy, Peters also failed to practise what he preached. If he was so eager to reorient the cartographic tradition of putting Europe at the centre of the map and distorting colonized nations, then why, asked his critics, did he reproduce Greenwich as his central meridian when somewhere in Africa, China, or the Pacific could have been easily adopted? Another problem identified by the critics was the political dimensions of his projection. ‘Since area alone is neither the cause nor the symptom of division between the North and South,’ wrote David Cooper, ‘does this map improve our understanding of the problems of the world?’23 By producing a map which ostensibly offered equality of surface area in its projection, Peters implied that it was possible to address political inequality. Size, at least for Peters, did matter. But, as another critic asked, did a more accurate representation of the size of Indonesia really address that country’s exceptionally high infant mortality rate, or only further obscure it? To some extent it was a valid question, but Peters’s point was that perceiving Indonesia according to its actual relative size was an important step in establishing its place in the wider geopolitical world. Such criticisms suggested the need for a debate (not pursued for several years) as to how any world map could meaningfully address statistically derived social inequalities in graphic form.

  Nearly all of Peters’s critics questioned his attack on Mercator to the exclusion of almost all other projections. To ascribe ‘Eurocentrism’ and complicity in the subsequent colonization of large sections of the globe to Mercator appeared anachronistic, and conceded far greater power and authority to the map than it actually possessed. Many reviewers pointed out that the technical limitations of Mercator’s projection had been acknowledged from the eighteenth century, and that its influence in maps and atlases had been on the wane since at least the late nineteenth century. Mercator was too easy a target to condemn as producing an ‘inaccurate’ world map to allow the promotion of Peters’s ‘accurate’ map with its depiction of equal-area over all other elements. It was a grossly simplistic opposition that ignored countless other projections, but one which, in its visual clarity, would quickly capture the public imagination.

  More than thirty years after its first publication, the Peters projection still causes consternation among the cartographic profession, and curiosity in the media. In 2001 the acclaimed US television political drama series The West Wing featured the fictional ‘Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality’, lobbying presidential staff to ‘support legislation that would make it mandatory for every public school in America to teach geography using the Peters projection map instead of the traditional Mercator [map]’.24 Following the episode’s release the Peters projection experienced a fivefold increase in sales. The distinguished American geographer Mark Monmonier remained unimpressed. In 2004, two years after Peters’s death, Monmonier revisited the controversy in his book Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, a social history of the Mercator projection. He castigated Peters for offering ‘a ludicrously inapt solution’ to the problem of how to revise Mercator’s methods, and argued that ‘the Peters map is not only an equal-area map but an exceptionally bad equal-area map that severely distorts the shapes of tropical nations its proponents profess to support’.25

  By the time Monmonier made his reflective but still hostile criticism of Peters, the map and its projection were no longer used in atlases, and were already becoming objects of historical curiosity. In reassessing now both the technical and political controversy of the Peters projection, it is possible to see it as what has been called a ‘defining moment’ in the history of mapmaking. Peters’s methods were suspect and his world map made unsustainable claims for greater accuracy, but his work revealed a more important truth about mapmaking: by arguing that all maps and their projections are either deliberately or inadvertently shaped by their social and political times, the ‘map wars’ ignited by Peters forced mapmakers to concede that their maps had never been, and never could be, ideologically neutral or scientifically objective ‘correct’ representations of the space they claimed to depict. Peters asked both cartographers and the general public to confront the fact that all maps are in some way partial and, as a consequence, political.

  This turn to politics was a direct consequence of Peters’s personal experience of a century that witnessed the political appropriation of maps for the purposes of milita
ry conquest, imperial administration and national self-definition. But in the phenomenal impact of the Apollo 17 earth photographs he also saw the power of the image of the whole earth to inspire awareness of the environment and of the baleful effects of inequality across the globe. If Peters made one mistake above and beyond his questionable cartography, it was in failing to acknowledge that his own map was just another partial representation of the world, and was subject to the same interplay of political forces that he identified throughout the course of Western cartography. Now, nearly forty years after it was first published, we can see more clearly the place of Peters and his world map in the history of mapmaking.

  • • •

  Despite his antagonism towards Mercator’s projection and the historical gulf that separated them, Peters’s own life reveals that he and Mercator had more in common than he probably liked to admit. Like Mercator, Peters was born in the German-speaking lands east of the Rhine during a time of political and military conflict. Growing up in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and the Nazi Germany of the 1930s, and building his career in the post-Second World War context of a politically divided West and East Germany, Peters understood better than most how geography could be used to divide nations and people. He was born in Berlin in 1916 into a family of labour and union activists, and his father was imprisoned by the Nazis for his political beliefs. The teenage Peters was educated in first Berlin and then the United States, where he studied film production, writing his Ph.D. thesis on ‘Film as a Means of Public Leadership’ as Europe descended once again into total war (it was this interest in propaganda that many of his later critics would seize on when claiming his ‘manipulation’ of cartography). Recalling the origins of his politicization in the 1970s, Peters wrote that ‘it was here in Berlin, three decades ago, that my basic criticisms of our historic-geographical view of the world crystallised’. Having witnessed the widescale manipulation of cartography throughout the Second World War, Peters concluded that his critique would be aimed subsequently at ‘the narrowness of our European-oriented – nay German-oriented – view of the world and the realisation of its incongruity with the broad, all-embracing manner of regarding the world and life in our epoch’.26