A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  In the late 1940s Peters worked as an independent scholar, receiving funding from the German regional government and the US military to write a textbook on global history that could be used in both East and West Germany. The result, the Synchronoptische Weltgeschichte, or ‘Synchronoptic World History’, was published in 1952. A synchronoptic perspective involves displaying several timelines concurrently, and this is what Peters created in attempting to avoid the traditional linear, written accounts of history focused on Western achievements. Using noticeably geographical language, Peters complained that, in concentrating on European history, ‘the remaining nine tenths of the occupied earth’ gets ignored. A good example of his revisionist approach can be seen in his account of the Middle Ages: ‘six hundred years of Greco-Roman flowering are stretched in our world histories to make it seem as though human civilization began with them. After the decline, history books move rapidly again. As is well known, the so-called Middle-Ages are “Dark Ages” in Europe, and therefore in our history books. But for the rest of the world, these thousand years were an age of flowering.’27 In an attempt to provide equal weight to each slice of history, Peters abandoned a written narrative and instead described the period from 1000 BC to AD 1952 through a series of tables ‘of eight colours divided into six bands: economics, intellectual life, religion, politics, war and revolution’.28 Central to its creation was, Peters argued, the ‘idea of charting time in the same manner as space is charted on our maps’. Describing the genesis of his book, Peters recalled, ‘I took a sheet of blank paper and first entered time as such to scale. Each year got a vertical strip, one centimetre in breadth.’ As a result, ‘the map of time was born’.29

  The right-of centre German magazine Der Spiegel described the book as ‘the biggest scandal of the last two weeks’.30 Peters’s later critics would leap upon the controversy to suggest that decades before publication of his geographical projection he had already been manipulating academic information for personal and political ends. In December 1952 the right-wing American magazine The Freeman published an article entitled ‘Official Misinformation’, in which it reported with indignation that US officials in Germany had ‘with the laudable motive of “democratizing” that country’, commissioned Peters and his wife to write their ‘World History’, but ‘only after they had spent $47,600 on the project and distributed 1100 of 9200 copies received, did they learn that the authors of the book were Communists and the book itself pro-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic’. Such lurid accusations were hardly justified by the text of Peters’s book, which went on to become a bestseller, but that did nothing to abate The Freeman’s wrath. ‘So the American taxpayers are not merely the victims of a £47,600 swindle,’ it thundered; ‘they have been gravely injured by incompetent and disloyal officials who used their funds to finance enemy propaganda.’31

  But Der Spiegel took a more emollient approach to the controversy. Its main objection to the book lay not with its content, but with the revelation that it was partly financed by a member of the SPD (German Socialist Party). Der Spiegel praised the book as a laudable but unsuccessful attempt to provide a comprehensive account of world history. Peters claimed that his book was trying ‘to bring equality and balance to the treatment of history’, but within the context of the polarized world of US–Soviet Cold War politics, such progressive initiatives by academics like Peters were inevitably prey to ideological attacks by not just right-wing publications like The Freeman, but also left-wing authorities like the SPD, who argued that simply allocating space to huge periods of prehistory during which, as far as they were concerned, nothing really happened, seemed absurd. As a result, the book was partially withdrawn from circulation.

  It is ironic that Peters should develop his subsequent geographical projection as a result of working on a history of the world (as he later acknowledged), in much the same way that his bête noire Gerard Mercator had compiled an innovative chronology of world history as he completed his famous map projection. Their intellectual and ideological influences were of course very different, but both produced their histories in accordance with deeply held personal convictions. For Mercator, this was the righteousness of biblical scripture; for Peters, it was the equality of all nations and races. Both men produced books that required a different spatial approach to world history through the use of columns and tables, and both realized that their universal histories led them to a reconsideration of how to portray global geography. Mercator’s preoccupations were shaped by the theological and commercial imperatives of his time, which led him to create a map that allowed people to navigate (practically and even spiritually) across the world. In contrast, Peters appreciated that accurate navigation was no longer the aim of a global projection. For him, living in an age he called ‘the post-colonial period’, defined by global warfare, nationalism and decolonization, questions of land distribution, population control and economic inequality were central to the study of geography and the practice of mapmaking.

  Following the publication (and subsequent withdrawal) of his ‘World History’, Peters spent the late 1950s and 1960s editing the German Socialist magazine Periodikum, as his interests became more focused on space and cartography. ‘During the preparation of an atlas volume to accompany my synchronoptic world history,’ he wrote, ‘it became clear to me that existing global maps were worthless for an objective representation of historical situations and events.’ He went on, ‘the quest for the causes of arrogance and xenophobia has led me repeatedly back to the global map as being primarily responsible for forming people’s impression of the world seen from their standpoint.’32 It was a compelling statement about the power of maps, and its ramifications would come to dominate the rest of Peters’s career. When he disseminated his new map within the academic community, Peters’s projection was just one among a bewildering variety of others; by turning to the world’s media and announcing a ‘new map of the world’ at his press conference in Bonn, Peters changed dramatically the terms on which both the public and academia understood the role of world maps.

  Fig. 36 Diagrams of twentieth-century map projections.

  There is an immediate difficulty in providing an objective account of Peters’s aims, because his own arguments were so steeped in the kind of myths, ideological presumptions, scientific errors and self-aggrandizement that he was quick to identify in earlier cartographers. It is also difficult to distinguish his claims of cartographic accuracy from his reactions to the prejudicial and often highly personal criticism that quickly followed, and which often led him to change the terms of the debate. We can, however, now piece together his published statements and lectures over two decades to describe what Peters thought he was doing, before assessing the avalanche of argument and debate that greeted his projection.

  Throughout the twentieth century, developments in communications, transportation and global strategy and related innovations in surveying methods, statistical analysis and aerial photography produced new uses for maps. This led to a proliferation of new projections and revisions to established ones based on the appropriateness of particular mapping methods for specific practical applications. For example, as Mercator’s projection became increasingly questioned as a way of representing the globe, it gained a new lease of life as a method of regional surveying.33 In The New Cartography, Peters both described and responded to the increasing diversity of map projections by explaining what he regarded as a series of ‘myths’ that sustained traditional cartography, or what he called ‘half truths, irrelevancies and distortions’. He summarized these as the myth ‘that Europe dominates the world from a central position on the globe’.34 He then went on to offer ‘the five decisive mathematical qualities and the five most vital utilitarian aesthetic qualities’ which he believed were necessary for an accurate modern map of the world. The five decisive qualities were fidelity of area, axis, position, scale and proportionality; the five ‘vital’ qualities were univers
ality, totality, supplementability, clarity and adaptability.35 In providing an overview of eight historical map projections from Mercator’s to his own, Peters scored his map ten out of ten, while the 1569 Mercator projection, Ernst Hammer’s 1892 equal-area projection, and J. Paul Goode’s elaborate 1923 projection that split the world into six lobes, all lagged well behind with a poor four out of ten. Peters’s nearest rival, Hammer’s equal-area projection, was dismissed for its complex curved parallels and apparent lack of universality and adaptability.

  For Peters, what he called ‘fidelity of area’ was central to his new projection: it should ensure that ‘any two selected areas are in the same proportion to one another as they are on the globe’, because ‘only with this property can the real proportion of the sizes of various continents of the earth be achieved’. Cartographers call this particular method an equal-area projection as it retains the equivalence in size of territorial areas. Like Mercator’s map, it is based on wrapping a flat map around a cylinder, but the crucial difference is that whereas Mercator’s projection retains conformality, the correct shape around a particular point, an equal-area projection retains equivalence according to relative area. To achieve this, Peters had to find a different way of spacing his parallels and meridians.

  Based on established measurements of the globe’s circumference, Peters drew standard parallels at 45° N and 45° S, where minimal distortion occurred in transferring the globe onto a flat map. He plotted parallels of latitude which are all the same length as the equator. He then halved the scale from east to west running along the equatorial line, while doubling the scale running north to south at the equator to create a rectangular frame. It is no surprise that, whereas Mercator was influenced by the need to move across the sixteenth-century globe according to the exigencies of trade from east to west, Peters plotted a projection according to the north–south economic and political preoccupations of the second half of the twentieth century. The result of this north–south elongation and east–west compression is quite obvious on Peters’s map: tropical areas in the southern hemisphere such as Africa and South America are long and thin, while the increasing compression towards the poles makes regions like Canada and Asia appear squat and fat. Even though the particular shapes of these areas were distorted through relative compression or elongation, such distortions allowed Peters to transfer relative surface area from the globe onto the map more accurately.36

  The concern with area was central to Peters’s political argument over the significance of map projections. For Peters, the relative failure to represent the world according to area, culminating in Mercator’s conformal projection, was a basic act of political inequality. Looking only at the representation of territorial areas, Peters had a point: on the Mercator projection, Europe, at 9.7 million square kilometres, appears considerably larger than South America, which is nearly twice the size, 17.8 square kilometres; at 19 million square kilometres, North America is represented as considerably larger than Africa, 30 million square kilometres. Although China covers 9.5 million square kilometres, on the Mercator map it is dwarfed by Greenland, which is just 2.1 million square kilometres. A similar point can be made by looking at most atlases published prior to Peters’s projection. The geographer Jeremy Crampton surveyed a range of twentieth-century atlases and found that, despite covering 20 per cent of the earth’s land area, Africa was usually represented by just three maps on a scale of 1:8,250,000. In contrast the United Kingdom, covering just 0.16 per cent of the earth’s land area, is shown on three maps using a more detailed scale of at least 1:1,250,000.37 Such inequalities were summarized in the Brandt Report (1980), which divided the world between the developed northern hemisphere, covering just over 30 million square kilometres, and the developing southern hemisphere, covering over 62 million square kilometres.

  Although the calculation of equal-area was central to the political and mathematical definition of Peters’s projection, his New Cartography also laid out what he regarded as further requirements of any new map of the world. He dismissed any global projection that adopted curved meridians (of which there were many, both before and after Mercator) by invoking his second decisive quality: fidelity of axis. ‘A map has this quality’, Peters claimed, ‘if all points, which on the globe lie north of any selected reference point, lie exactly vertically above it and all points to its south lie exactly vertically below it.’ According to Peters, this quality aids ‘orientation’ and the accurate imposition of international time zones across its surface. In effect, it meant imposing a uniform rectangular grid of parallels and meridians across the earth’s surface, like Mercator’s – or his own.

  Next came fidelity of position. This, according to Peters, is achieved when ‘all points which exist at an equal distance from the equator are portrayed as lying on a line parallel to the equator’, a quality that again can only be achieved through a graticule of right-angled parallels and meridians. Fidelity of scale ‘reproduces the original (the surface of the globe) with quantifiable accuracy’. Because of his concern with ‘absolute fidelity of area’, Peters rejected the usual scales (for example, 1:75,000,000), and adopted a scale which, in the case of his projection, was 1 square centimetre to 123,000 square kilometres.38 Finally came what Peters called ‘proportionality’. Any map ‘on which the longitudinal distortion along its upper edge is as great (or as small) as along its lower edge’ is proportional. His projection certainly complied with this principle, but Peters also admitted that proportionality was required to minimize what was still an inevitable ‘degree of distortion’, in the transfer of the globe onto any flat map projection of the world. At least, he added with deft understatement, the apparent proportionality of his own map ensured ‘an even distribution of errors’.

  Each of Peters’s other five ‘vital’ qualities ultimately denigrated rival projections at the expense of his own. Universality, totality and adaptability emphasize the need for one uninterrupted projection of the world that can be used for a variety of geographical purposes, while ‘supplementability’ and ‘clarity’ allowed for a comprehensive perspective of the earth. Most of these categories were aimed at dismissing another group of equal-area world maps, constructed along the lines of so-called ‘interrupted’ projections. As their name suggests, these maps attempted to minimize distortion by ‘interrupting’ or dividing the globe up into discrete sections. Peters took as his example J. Paul Goode’s equal-area projection, invented in 1923. Goode fused various projections to come up with a map that divided the earth into six peculiarly shaped lobes, which looked like a peeled and flattened orange. It was a sign of the impossibility of achieving both conformality and equivalence of the globe on a flat map that Goode needed to resort to such a contorted and discontinuous shape to come to a closer approximation of the spherical earth in two dimensions.

  Peters was quick to point out that such ‘interrupted’ maps lacked universality, totality or clarity at either a technical or even aesthetic level. Nor could they be easily adapted for more detailed mapping of local regions. For Peters, these projections came closest to challenging Mercator’s cartographic dominance because ‘they have fidelity of area, but they bought this quality at the price of abandoning important qualities of Mercator’s map’ such as clarity and supplementability, ‘and could therefore not supplant it’. In one deft move, Peters dismissed all earlier map projections, apart from Mercator’s, which was ideologically partial in its apparent ‘Eurocentrism’, and motivated by its inventor ‘following the old, naïve practice of placing his homeland in the centre of the map’. Ultimately, the only world map able to achieve what Peters called ‘the objectivity necessary in this scientific era’39 was his own.

  Despite these claims about the originality and accuracy of his map, Peters’s critics quickly spotted what they regarded as another example of his opportunism and unreliability: his projection was not new at all. It had been invented over a century earlier, by a Scottish evangelical minister, the Rev
erend James Gall (1808–95), who presented his new map at an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1855, and labelled it ‘Gall’s Orthographic Projection’. To all intents and purposes it is identical to Peters’s projection, so much so that many cartographers now refer to it as the ‘Gall–Peters Projection’. In fact Gall’s projection itself had been previously attributed to Marinus of Tyre (c. AD 100) by Ptolemy.

  Fig. 37 James Gall, ‘Gall’s Orthographic Projection’, 1885.

  Peters always denied that he knew of Gall’s projection, which is surprising considering his immersion in the history of map projections. Gall and Peters had much in common, although the contrasting response to their ‘new’ projections reveals a great deal about the state of geography in their respective eras. Like Peters, Gall was an amateur cartographer, and a prolific writer. He was a classic Victorian gentleman-scholar: deeply religious, highly learned, passionate about social welfare and slightly eccentric. His publications ranged from religion to education and social welfare; they included books on a triangular alphabet for the blind and The Primeval Man Unveiled (1871), in which he claimed that Satan and his demons were a pre-Adamic race of men who lived on the earth prior to Creation. His books on astronomy were particularly popular, and included the People’s Atlas of the Stars, and An Easy Guide to the Constellations (1866).