A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  58. Mackinder, ‘Geographical Pivot’, p. 436.

  59. Ibid., p. 437.

  60. Spencer Wilkinson et al., ‘The Geographical Pivot of History: Discussion’, Geographical Journal, 23/4 (1904), pp. 437–44, at p. 438.

  61. Ibid., p. 438.

  62. Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (1919; Washington, 1996), pp. 64–5.

  63. Ibid., p. 106.

  64. Mackinder, ‘The Round World’, p. 601.

  65. Ibid., pp. 604–5.

  66. Colin S. Gray, ‘The Continued Primacy of Geography’, Orbis, 40/2 (1996), pp. 247–59, at p. 258.

  67. Quoted in Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, p. 8.

  68. Ibid., p. 17.

  69. Ibid., pp. 17–18.

  70. Quotations from Geoffrey Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (Beckenham, 1985), pp. 16, 31.

  71. Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan (eds.), Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy (Oxford, 1999), pp. 1–2; Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought, p. 6.

  72. Quoted in Saul Bernard Cohen, Geopolitics of the World System (Lanham, Md., 2003), p. 11.

  73. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston, 1890), p. 42.

  74. Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, p. 4; Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 96–7.

  75. Quoted in Ronald Johnston et al. (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edn. (Oxford, 2000), p. 27.

  76. Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum’, German Studies Review, 3/1 (1980), pp. 51–68.

  77. Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire; Brian Blouet (ed.), Global Geostrategy: Mackinder and the Defence of the West (Oxford, 2005); David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, 1992), pp. 190–96; Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of Super Power (Lexington, Ky., 1988), pp. 4–12; Gray and Sloan, Geopolitics, pp. 15–62; and the special issue of Geographical Journal, 170 (2004).

  78. Quoted in Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, p. 62.

  79. Livingstone, Geographical Tradition, p. 190.

  80. Christopher J. Fettweis, ‘Sir Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics and Policymaking in the 21st Century’, Parameters, 30/2 (2000), pp. 58–72.

  81. Paul Kennedy, ‘The Pivot of History’, Guardian, 19 June 2004, p. 23.

  CHAPTER 11. EQUALITY: THE PETERS PROJECTION, 1973

  1. Quoted in Nicholas Mansergh (ed.), The Transfer of Power, 1942–47, 12 vols. (London, 1970), vol. 12, no. 488, appendix 1.

  2. Quoted in Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, 2007), p. 125.

  3. On the partition, see O. H. K. Spate, ‘The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal’, Geographical Journal, 110/4 (1947), pp. 201–18, and Tan Tai Yong, ‘“Sir Cyril Goes to India”: Partition, Boundary-Making and Disruptions in the Punjab’, Punjab Studies, 4/1 (1997), pp. 1–20.

  4. Quoted in John Pickles, ‘Text, Hermeneutics and Propaganda Maps’, in Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (eds.), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London, 1992), pp. 193–230, at p. 197.

  5. See Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven, 1997), pp. 123–8.

  6. Denis Cosgrove, ‘Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84/2 (1994), pp. 270–94.

  7. Quoted in Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford, 2008), p. 23.

  8. Joe Alex Morris, ‘Dr Peters’ Brave New World’, Guardian, 5 June 1973.

  9. See Mark Monmonier, Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy (New York, 1996), p. 10.

  10. Arthur H. Robinson, ‘Arno Peters and his New Cartography’, American Geographer, 12/2 (1985), pp. 103–11, at p. 104.

  11. Jeremy Crampton, ‘Cartography’s Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy’, Cartographica, 31/4 (1994), pp. 16–32.

  12. New Internationalist, 124 (1983).

  13. Jeremy Crampton, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS (Oxford, 2010), p. 92.

  14. Derek Maling, ‘A Minor Modification to the Cylindrical Equal-Area Projection’, Geographical Journal, 140/3 (1974), pp. 509–10.

  15. Norman Pye, review of the Peters Atlas of the World by Arno Peters, Geographical Journal, 155/2 (1989), pp. 295–7.

  16. H. A. G. Lewis, review of The New Cartography by Arno Peters, Geographical Journal, 154/2 (1988), pp. 298–9.

  17. Quoted in Stephen Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium: The Discovery of New Geographies (New York, 1992), p. 380.

  18. Robinson, ‘Arno Peters’, pp. 103, 106.

  19. Quoted in John Loxton, ‘The Peters Phenomenon’, Cartographic Journal, 22 (1985), pp. 106–10, at pp. 108, 110.

  20. Quoted in Monmonier, Drawing the Line, pp. 30–32.

  21. Maling, ‘Minor Modification’, p. 510.

  22. Lewis, review of The New Cartography, pp. 298–9.

  23. David Cooper, ‘The World Map in Equal Area Presentation: Peters Projection’, Geographical Journal, 150/3 (1984), pp. 415–16.

  24. The West Wing, season 2, episode 16, first screened 28 February 2001.

  25. Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Map Projection (Chicago, 2004), p. 15.

  26. Arno Peters, ‘Space and Time: Their Equal Representation as an Essential Basis for a Scientific View of the World’, lecture presented at Cambridge University, 29 March 1982, trans. Ward L. Kaiser and H. Wohlers (New York, 1982), p. 1. On Peters’s biography, see his obituary published in The Times, 10 December 2002, and the series of articles published to commemorate his life and work in the Cartographic Journal, 40/1 (2003).

  27. Quoted in Stefan Muller, ‘Equal Representation of Time and Space: Arno Peters’s Universal History’, History Compass, 8/7 (2010), pp. 718–29.

  28. Quoted in Crampton, ‘Cartography’s Defining Moment’, p. 23.

  29. Peters, ‘Space and Time’, pp. 8–9.

  30. Crampton, ‘Cartography’s Defining Moment’, p. 22; see also The Economist’s review of the Peters Atlas, 25 March 1989.

  31. The Freeman: A Fortnightly for Individualists, Monday, 15 December 1952, p. 188.

  32. Arno Peters, The New Cartography [Die Neue Kartographie] (New York, 1983), p. 146.

  33. Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization: Cartogrophy in Culture and Society (Chicago, 1996), p. 224.

  34. Peters, The New Cartography, p. 102.

  35. Ibid., pp. 102, 107–18.

  36. See Monmonier, Drawing the Line, pp. 12–13; Robinson, ‘Arno Peters’, p. 104; Norman Pye, review of ‘Map of the World: Peters Projection’, Geographical Journal, 157/1 (1991), p. 95.

  37. Crampton, ‘Cartography’s Defining Moment’, p. 24.

  38. Pye, ‘Map of the World’, pp. 95–6.

  39. Peters, The New Cartography, pp. 128, 148.

  40. James Gall, An Easy Guide to the Constellations (Edinburgh, 1870), p. 3.

  41. James Gall, ‘Use of Cylindrical Projections for Geographical, Astronomical, and Scientific Purposes’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 1/4 (1885), pp. 119–23, at p. 119.

  42. James Gall, ‘On Improved Monographic Projections of the World’, British Association of Advanced Science (1856), p. 148.

  43. Gall, ‘Use of Cylindrical Projections’, p. 121.

  44. Monmonier, Drawing the Line, pp. 13–14.

  45. Crampton, ‘Cartography’s Defining Moment’, pp. 21–2.

  46. Gall, ‘Use of Cylindrical Projections’, p. 122.

  47. Quotations from
North-South: A Programme for Survival (London, 1980). Figures taken from http://www.stwr.org/special-features/the-brandt-report.html#setting.

  48. Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (London, 2007), pp. 4–5, 124–9.

  49. J. B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map’, in Barnes and Duncan, Writing Worlds, pp. 231–47.

  50. David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, 1992).

  51. Alfred Korzybski, ‘General Semantics, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Prevention’, in Korzybski, Collected Writings (Fort Worth, Tex., 1990), p. 205.

  52. J. B. Harley, ‘Can There Be a Cartographic Ethics?’, Cartographic Perspectives, 10 (1991), pp. 9–16, at pp. 10–11.

  53. Peter Vujakovic, ‘The Extent of the Adoption of the Peters Projection by “Third World” Organizations in the UK’, Society of University Cartographers Bulletin (SUC), 21/1 (1987), pp. 11–15, and ‘Mapping for World Development’, Geography, 74 (1989), pp. 97–105.

  CHAPTER 12. INFORMATION: GOOGLE EARTH, 2012

  1. At least for those using the application based in Europe; by default it centres itself on the region in which the user logs on.

  2. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2009/04/google_maps_surpasses_mapquest.html. I am grateful to Simon Greenman for this reference.

  3. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Releases_October_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings.

  4. http://www.thedomains.com/2010/07/26/googles-global-search-share-declines/.

  5. Kenneth Field, ‘Maps, Mashups and Smashups’, Cartographic Journal, 45/4 (2008), pp. 241–5.

  6. David Vise, The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time (New York, 2006), pp. 1, 3.

  7. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/technology/20image.html.

  8. http://spatiallaw.blogspot.com/.

  9. Jeremy W. Crampton, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS (Oxford, 2010), p. 129.

  10. Field, ‘Maps, Mashups’, p. 242.

  11. I am grateful to Patricia Seed for her views on this aspect of the application, and providing me with the phrase ‘data aggregator’ (personal email correspondence, November 2011).

  12. David Y. Allen, ‘A Mirror of our World: Google Earth and the History of Cartography’, Coordinates, series b, 12 (2009), pp. 1–16, at p. 9.

  13. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1: The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, 1998; second edn., 2007), p. 509.

  14. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 3: End of Millennium (Oxford, 1998), p. 1.

  15. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 501, 52, 508.

  16. Matthew A. Zook and Mark Graham, ‘Mapping DigiPlace: Geocoded Internet Data and the Representation of Place’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34 (2007), pp. 466–82.

  17. Eric Gordon, ‘Mapping Digital Networks: From Cyberspace to Google’, Information, Communication and Society, 10/6 (2007), pp. 885–901.

  18. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (London, 2011), pp. 8–10.

  19. http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/.

  20. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 11.

  21. Ibid., p. 144.

  22. Ronald E. Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History and Power (Carbondale, Ill., 2008), pp. 38–43.

  23. Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (1948), pp. 379–423, at p. 379.

  24. Crampton, Mapping, pp. 49–52.

  25. Quoted ibid., p. 58.

  26. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 40.

  27. Duane F. Marble, ‘Geographic Information Systems: An Overview’, in Donna J. Peuquet and Duane F. Marble (eds.), Introductory Readings in Geographic Information Systems (London, 1990), pp. 4–14.

  28. Roger Tomlinson, ‘Geographic Information Systems: A New Frontier’, in Peuquet and Marble, Introductory Readings, pp. 15–27 at p. 17.

  29. J. T. Coppock and D. W. Rhind, ‘The History of GIS’, in D. J. Maguire et al. (eds.), Geographical Information Systems, vol. 1 (New York, 1991), pp. 21–43.

  30. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

  31. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 50–51.

  32. Ibid., p. 61.

  33. An earlier version of the film, entitled Rough Sketch, was made in 1968, and formed the basis of the slightly longer 1977 version, released under its current title. See http://powersof10.com/.

  34. Christopher C. Tanner, Christopher J. Migdal and Michael T. Jones, ‘The Clipmap: A Virtual Mipmap’, Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, July 1998, pp.151–8, at p. 151.

  35. Avi Bar-Zeev, ‘How Google Earth [Really] Works’, accessed at: http://www.realityprime.com/articles/how-google-earth-really-works.

  36. Mark Aubin, ‘Google Earth: From Space to your Face . . . and Beyond’, accessed at http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0604_01.html.

  37. http://msrmaps.com/About.aspx?n=AboutWhatsNew&b=Newsite.

  38. Mark Aubin, co-founder of Keyhole, Inc., in an article entitled ‘Notes on the Origin of Google Earth’, accessed at: http://www.realityprime.com/articles/notes-on-the-origin-of-google-earth.

  39. Michael T. Jones, ‘The New Meaning of Maps’, talk delivered at the ‘Where 2.0’ conference, San Jose, California, 31 March 2010, accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWj8qtIvkkg.

  40. http://www.isde5.org/al_gore_speech.htm.

  41. Simon Greenman, personal email communication, December 2010. I am very grateful to Simon for sharing his first-hand knowledge of the development of geospatial applications with me.

  42. Avi Bar-Zeev, ‘Notes on the Origin of Google Earth’, accessed at: http://www.realityprime.com/articles/notes-on-the-origin-of-google-earth.

  43. ‘Google Earth Co-founder Speaks’, accessed at: http://techbirmingham.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/googleearth-aita/.

  44. For a visual example, see ‘Tiny Tech Company Awes Viewers’, USA Today, 21 March 2003, accessed at: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003–03–20-earthviewer_x.htm.

  45. http://www.iqt.org/news-and-press/press-releases/2003/Keyhole_06–25–03.html.

  46. http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/keyhole.html.

  47. Quoted in Jeremy W. Crampton, ‘Keyhole, Google Earth, and 3D Worlds: An Interview with Avi Bar-Zeev’, Cartographica, 43/2 (2008), pp. 85–93, at p. 89.

  48. Vise, The Google Story.

  49. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’, Seventh International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW 1998), 14–18 April 1998, Brisbane, Australia, accessed at: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/.

  50. http://ontargetwebsolutions.com/search-engine-blog/orlando-seo-statistics/. These figures are estimates and not verified by Google.

  51. http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/24/google-facts-and-figures-massive-infographic/.

  52. On Google’s stated policy, see http://www.google.com/corporate/; http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html.

  53. Harry McCracken, ‘First Impressions: Google’s Amazing Earth’, accessed at: http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/000748.html.

  54. Personal interviews with Ed Parsons, April 2009 and November 2010. All Parsons’s subsequent quotes are based on these interviews. I am extremely grateful to Ed for taking the time to conduct these interviews.

  55. Aubin, ‘Google Earth’, accessed at http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0604_01.html.

  56. http://www.techdigest.tv/2009/01/d
ick_cheneys_ho.html.

  57. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-your-way.html.

  58. http://media.digitalglobe.com/index.php?s=43&item=147, http://news.cnet.com/8301–1023_3–10028842–93.html.

  59. Jones, ‘The New Meaning of Maps’.

  60. Ed Parsons, personal interview, April 2010.

  61. Crampton, Mapping, p. 133.

  62. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/earthly-pleasures-come-to-maps.html.

  63. Michael T. Jones, ‘Google’s Geospatial Organizing Principle’, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2007), pp. 8–13, at p. 11.

  64. http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe; http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/.

  65. Waldo Tobler, ‘A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region’, Economic Geography, 46 (1970), pp. 234–40, at p. 236.

  66. Personal interview with Ed Parsons, April 2010.

  67. http://www.gpsworld.com/gis/integration-and-standards/the-view-google-earth-7434.

  68. Steven Levy, ‘Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability’, Wired Magazine, 17.06, accessed at: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17–06/nep_googlenomics?currentPage=all.

  69. https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords&hl=en_GB<mpl=adwords&passive=true&ifr=false&alwf=true&continue=https://adwords.google.com/um/gaiaauth?apt%3DNone%26ugl%3Dtrue&gsessionid=2-eFqz0_CDGDCfqiSMq9sQ.

  70. Levy, ‘Secret of Googlenomics’.

  71. Jones, ‘The New Meaning of Maps’.

  72. Matthew A. Zook and Mark Graham, ‘The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the Privatization of Cyberspace and DigiPlace’, Geoforum, 38 (2007), pp. 1322–43.

  73. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p. 112.

  74. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/12/google-the-future-of-books/?pagination=false#fn2–496790631.

  75. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704461304576216923562033348.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories.

  76. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/10/google-antitrust-and-not-being-evil.