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3.55 AVERAGE
3.55 AVERAGE
I loved this book. Once I got past the early modern maps I kept thinking, "well, the next chapter won't be as interesting", but Brotton kept me enthralled all the way up to the last chapter, on Google Maps. I thought the chapter on Mercator was outstanding, and the chapter on the Peters Projection went far beyond Peters' criticisms of the Mercator map and the subsequent backlash against Peters. I do wish there were more illustrations, and that some of the illustrations were clearer, but those are minor grumbles. If you have any interest in cartography, this book is for you.
Brotton, Jerry (2012). A History of the World in Twelve Maps. London: Penguin. 2012. ISBN 9781846145704. Pagine 492. 23,04 €
A History of the World in Twelve Maps
penguin.co.uk
Jerry Brotton è un giornalista dalla BBC e il libro (se capisco bene) è figlio di una serie televisiva, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession.
Il libro mantiene esattamente quello che promette: i suoi dodici capitoli illustrano ciascuno una tappa nella storia della cartografia e un problema nella rappresentazione dello spazio (e del tempo). Il tutto scritto in modo piano e convincente e ricco di informazioni curiose (di una ho già parlato qui). Non resta che augurarsi che sia rapidamente tradotto in italiano.
Ecco le 12 mappe:
La scienza e la Geografiadi Tolomeo
Tolomeo
wikipedia.org
Lo scambio e il Sollazzodi Al-Idrisi
Al-Idrisi
wikipedia.org
La fede e il Mappamondodi Hereford
Hereford
wikipedia.org
La mappa del mondo di Kangnido
Kangnido
wikipedia.org
La scoperta e la mappa di Waldseemüller
America!
wikipedia.org
La globalizzazione e la mappa di Diogo Ribeiro
Diogo Ribeiro
wikipedia.org
La tolleranza e la mappa di Mercatore
Mercatore
wikipedia.org
Il danaro e l’atlante di Blaeu
Blaeu
wikipedia.org
La nazione e la carta di Francia della famiglia Cassini
Cassini
davidrumsey.com
La geopolitica e Halford Mackinder
Mackinder
wikipedia.org
L’eguaglianza e la proiezione di Peters
Peters
digilander.libero.it
L’informazione e Google Earth
* * *
Ecco le mie annotazioni, con i riferimenti numerici all’edizione Kindle.
Where would we be without maps? The obvious answer is, of course, ‘lost’ […] [238]
[…] ‘the map is not the territory’. [306: la citazione è del filosofo americano Alfred Korzybski, ‘General Semantics, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Prevention’ (1941), in Korzybski, Collected Writings, 1920–1950 (Fort Worth, Tex., 1990), p. 205]
In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the other-worldly character Mein Herr announces that ‘[w]e actually made a map of the country, on a scale of a mile to the mile!’ When asked if the map has been used much, Mein Herr admits, ‘It has never been spread out’, and that ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the county itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’ [315]
‘Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.’ [446: graffito su un muro della stazione di Paddington]
‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ [1126, da Ozymandias di Shelley]
The Geography was the first book that, either by accident or design, showed the potential of transmitting geographical data digitally. Rather than reproducing unreliable graphic, analogue elements to describe geographical information, the surviving copies of the Geography used the discrete, discontinuous signs of numbers and shapes – from the coordinates of places across the inhabited world to the geometry required to draw Ptolemy’s projections – to transmit its methods. [1135]
[…] Septemptrio (north, from the Latin for seven, referring to the seven stars of the Plough in the Great Bear, by which the direction of north was calculated). [1753: ne ho già parlato qui]
A nonary square is divided into nine equal squares, creating a three-by-three grid. Its origins remain obscure, ranging from the archaic observation of the shape of a turtle shell (with its round carapace covering the square plastron), to the more convincing explanation that the vast plains of northern China inspired a rectilinear way of understanding and dividing space. [2436]
By the end of the sixteenth century the name finally acquired universal geographical and toponymical status, thanks to German and Dutch mapmakers who needed a name to describe the continent and one which avoided ascribing it to a particular empire (some maps referred to it as ‘New Spain’) or religion (other maps labelled it ‘Land of the Holy Cross’). In the end, the name ‘America’ endured, not because of any agreement as to who discovered it, but because it was the most politically acceptable term available. [3377]
[…] ‘devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition.’ [3485: è una citazione di Michel Foucault]
Flirting with religion on maps was a dangerous business, with potentially fatal consequences. [4294]
To make a heart-shaped map in the first half of the sixteenth century was a clear statement of religious dissent. It invited its viewer to look to their conscience, and to see it within the wider context of a Stoic universe. But such flirtations with ‘pagan’ philosophy were not always welcomed by Catholic or Protestant authorities. [4374]
The result still caused distortion of land masses at the northern and southern extremities, but if Mercator could accurately calculate how far apart to space his parallels he could achieve something unique: what cartographers call ‘conformality’, defined as the maintenance of accurate angular relations at any point on a map. [4625]
Born into the Mennonite movement, an offshoot of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, with their strong tradition of personal spiritual responsibility and pacificism, his sympathies were decidedly libertarian, and many of his friends were Remonstrants or ‘Gomarists’ (named after the Dutch theologian Franciscus Gomarus, 1563–1641). [5005]
In 1636, following Galileo Galilei’s condemnation by the Catholic Inquisition for his heretical heliocentric beliefs, a group of Dutch scholars hatched a plan to offer the Italian astronomer asylum in the Dutch Republic. The plan was floated by the great jurist, diplomat (and Remonstrant sympathizer) Hugo Grotius – whose books were published by Blaeu – and was enthusiastically supported by Laurens Reael and Willem Blaeu. Beyond their intellectual belief in a heliocentric universe, all three men also had vested commercial interests in offering such an invitation. Grotius, having already written on the subject of navigation, was hoping to lure Galileo to Amsterdam so that he would offer the VOC a new method of determining longitude which, if successful, would give the Dutch complete domination of international navigation.32 Blaeu’s somewhat nonconformist intellectual beliefs coincided with his eye for a novel commercial opportunity: Galileo represented a new way of looking at the world, but it was also one that Blaeu might have calculated would give him a decisive edge in cartographic publishing in the 1630s. Ultimately, the plans to invite Galileo came to nothing, as the astronomer pleaded that ill health (and undoubtedly the terms of his house arrest by the Inquisition) prevented him from making what would have been a sensational defection to Europe’s leading Calvinist republic. [5099: è la storia che ho raccontato qui]
It was the product of a Dutch Republic that, following its violent struggle to break free of the Spanish Empire, created a global marketplace that preferred the accumulation of wealth over the acquisition of territory. Blaeu produced an atlas that was ultimately driven by the same imperatives. For him, it was not even necessary to place Amsterdam at the centre of such a world; Dutch financial power was increasingly pervasive but it was also invisible, seeping into every corner of the globe. In the seventeenth century as today, financial markets make little acknowledgement of political boundaries and centres when it comes to the accumulation of riches. [5359]
One toise was 6 French feet, or just under 2 metres […] [5532]
Newton concluded that the earth was not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid, slightly bulging at the equator and flattened at the poles. Cassini I and his son Jacques (Cassini II) were unconvinced, and followed the theories of René Descartes (1596–1650). Revered across Europe as the great philosopher of the mind, Descartes was also renowned as a ‘geometer’, or applied mathematician, who put forward the argument that the earth was a prolate ellipsoid, bulging at the poles but flatter at the equator, like an egg. His theory was widely accepted by the Académie, and the resolution of the controversy soon became a matter of national pride on both sides of the English Channel. [5589]
Ultimately, the Carte de Cassini was more than just a national survey. It enabled individuals to understand themselves as part of a nation. Today, in a world almost exclusively defined by the nation state, to say that people saw a place called ‘France’ when they looked at Cassini’s map of the country, and identified themselves as ‘French’ citizens living within its space seems patently obvious, but this was not the case at the end of the eighteenth century. Contrary to the rhetoric of nationalism, nations are not born naturally. They are invented at certain moments in history by the exigencies of political ideology. It is no coincidence that the dawn of the age of nationalism in the eighteenth century coincides almost exactly with the Cassini surveys and that ‘nationalism’ as a term was coined in the 1790s, just as the Cassini maps were nationalized in the name of the French Republic.
In his classic study of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the roots of national consciousness grew out of the long historical erosion of religious belief and imperial dynasties. As the certainty of religious salvation waned, the empires of the ancien régime in Europe slowly disintegrated. In the realm of personal belief, nationalism provided the compelling consolation of what Anderson calls ‘a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning’. [6046]
The consequence of all these changes was the emergence of a new genre, thematic mapping. A thematic map portrays the geographical nature of a variety of physical, and social, phenomena, and depicts the spatial distribution and variation of a chosen subject or theme which is usually invisible, such as crime, disease or poverty. Although used as early as the 1680s in meteorological charts drawn by Edmund Halley, thematic maps developed rapidly from the early 1800s with the growth in quantitative statistical methods and public censuses. The development of probability theory and the ability to regulate error in statistical analysis allowed the social sciences to compile vast amounts of data, including national censuses. In 1801 France and England conducted censuses to measure and classify their populations. [6169]
When Joseph Conrad’s protagonist Marlow peers at an imperial map in Heart of Darkness (1899), ‘marked with all the colours of the rainbow’, he is pleased to see ‘a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’. [6205]
One of the society’s councillors, the distinguished explorer and pioneering eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, responded with concerns about Mackinder’s attempt to claim geography as a science. Nevertheless, he was sympathetic to the moves to adopt geography as an academic discipline, and remarked that, whatever the limitations of his paper, he was sure Mackinder ‘was destined to leave his mark on geographical education’. Galton knew more than he admitted: he was already in talks with the authorities at both Oxford and Cambridge universities to appoint an RGS-funded reader in the subject, a society aspiration that stretched back to the early 1870s, and had stage-managed Mackinder’s invitation so that he would emerge as the most obvious candidate for any new post. On 24 May 1887, less than four months after Mackinder’s talk, Oxford University agreed to establish a five-year Readership in Geography, supported by RGS funds. The following month Mackinder was formally appointed, on a yearly salary of £300. [6321: anche Galton è un nostro vecchio amico, come si illustra qui]
[…] the disastrous Boer War (1899–1902), which had cost Britain more than £220 million, as well as the loss of 8,000 troops killed in action and a further 13,000 to disease. Of the estimated 32,000 Boers who died, the vast majority were women and children who died in British ‘concentration camps’, the first time such methods had been used in modern warfare. [6475]
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. [6916]
For Google, one justification of its geospatial applications is that the digital image of the earth becomes the medium through which all information is accessed; writing in 2007, Michael T. Jones claimed that Google ‘inverts the roles of Web browser as application and map as content, resulting in an experience where the planet itself is the browser’. The Earth application – according to Google – is the first place a viewer goes to access and view information. This seems, for the moment at least, to be a completely pure definition of a world map made up from its own cultural beliefs and assumptions, all of which are now potentially available at the click of a computer mouse. [7733]
In 1970, the American geographer Waldo Tobler famously invoked what he called ‘the first law of geography: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’. [7747]
A History of the World in Twelve Maps
penguin.co.uk
Jerry Brotton è un giornalista dalla BBC e il libro (se capisco bene) è figlio di una serie televisiva, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession.
Il libro mantiene esattamente quello che promette: i suoi dodici capitoli illustrano ciascuno una tappa nella storia della cartografia e un problema nella rappresentazione dello spazio (e del tempo). Il tutto scritto in modo piano e convincente e ricco di informazioni curiose (di una ho già parlato qui). Non resta che augurarsi che sia rapidamente tradotto in italiano.
Ecco le 12 mappe:
La scienza e la Geografiadi Tolomeo
Tolomeo
wikipedia.org
Lo scambio e il Sollazzodi Al-Idrisi
Al-Idrisi
wikipedia.org
La fede e il Mappamondodi Hereford
Hereford
wikipedia.org
La mappa del mondo di Kangnido
Kangnido
wikipedia.org
La scoperta e la mappa di Waldseemüller
America!
wikipedia.org
La globalizzazione e la mappa di Diogo Ribeiro
Diogo Ribeiro
wikipedia.org
La tolleranza e la mappa di Mercatore
Mercatore
wikipedia.org
Il danaro e l’atlante di Blaeu
Blaeu
wikipedia.org
La nazione e la carta di Francia della famiglia Cassini
Cassini
davidrumsey.com
La geopolitica e Halford Mackinder
Mackinder
wikipedia.org
L’eguaglianza e la proiezione di Peters
Peters
digilander.libero.it
L’informazione e Google Earth
* * *
Ecco le mie annotazioni, con i riferimenti numerici all’edizione Kindle.
Where would we be without maps? The obvious answer is, of course, ‘lost’ […] [238]
[…] ‘the map is not the territory’. [306: la citazione è del filosofo americano Alfred Korzybski, ‘General Semantics, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Prevention’ (1941), in Korzybski, Collected Writings, 1920–1950 (Fort Worth, Tex., 1990), p. 205]
In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the other-worldly character Mein Herr announces that ‘[w]e actually made a map of the country, on a scale of a mile to the mile!’ When asked if the map has been used much, Mein Herr admits, ‘It has never been spread out’, and that ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the county itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’ [315]
‘Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.’ [446: graffito su un muro della stazione di Paddington]
‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ [1126, da Ozymandias di Shelley]
The Geography was the first book that, either by accident or design, showed the potential of transmitting geographical data digitally. Rather than reproducing unreliable graphic, analogue elements to describe geographical information, the surviving copies of the Geography used the discrete, discontinuous signs of numbers and shapes – from the coordinates of places across the inhabited world to the geometry required to draw Ptolemy’s projections – to transmit its methods. [1135]
[…] Septemptrio (north, from the Latin for seven, referring to the seven stars of the Plough in the Great Bear, by which the direction of north was calculated). [1753: ne ho già parlato qui]
A nonary square is divided into nine equal squares, creating a three-by-three grid. Its origins remain obscure, ranging from the archaic observation of the shape of a turtle shell (with its round carapace covering the square plastron), to the more convincing explanation that the vast plains of northern China inspired a rectilinear way of understanding and dividing space. [2436]
By the end of the sixteenth century the name finally acquired universal geographical and toponymical status, thanks to German and Dutch mapmakers who needed a name to describe the continent and one which avoided ascribing it to a particular empire (some maps referred to it as ‘New Spain’) or religion (other maps labelled it ‘Land of the Holy Cross’). In the end, the name ‘America’ endured, not because of any agreement as to who discovered it, but because it was the most politically acceptable term available. [3377]
[…] ‘devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition.’ [3485: è una citazione di Michel Foucault]
Flirting with religion on maps was a dangerous business, with potentially fatal consequences. [4294]
To make a heart-shaped map in the first half of the sixteenth century was a clear statement of religious dissent. It invited its viewer to look to their conscience, and to see it within the wider context of a Stoic universe. But such flirtations with ‘pagan’ philosophy were not always welcomed by Catholic or Protestant authorities. [4374]
The result still caused distortion of land masses at the northern and southern extremities, but if Mercator could accurately calculate how far apart to space his parallels he could achieve something unique: what cartographers call ‘conformality’, defined as the maintenance of accurate angular relations at any point on a map. [4625]
Born into the Mennonite movement, an offshoot of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, with their strong tradition of personal spiritual responsibility and pacificism, his sympathies were decidedly libertarian, and many of his friends were Remonstrants or ‘Gomarists’ (named after the Dutch theologian Franciscus Gomarus, 1563–1641). [5005]
In 1636, following Galileo Galilei’s condemnation by the Catholic Inquisition for his heretical heliocentric beliefs, a group of Dutch scholars hatched a plan to offer the Italian astronomer asylum in the Dutch Republic. The plan was floated by the great jurist, diplomat (and Remonstrant sympathizer) Hugo Grotius – whose books were published by Blaeu – and was enthusiastically supported by Laurens Reael and Willem Blaeu. Beyond their intellectual belief in a heliocentric universe, all three men also had vested commercial interests in offering such an invitation. Grotius, having already written on the subject of navigation, was hoping to lure Galileo to Amsterdam so that he would offer the VOC a new method of determining longitude which, if successful, would give the Dutch complete domination of international navigation.32 Blaeu’s somewhat nonconformist intellectual beliefs coincided with his eye for a novel commercial opportunity: Galileo represented a new way of looking at the world, but it was also one that Blaeu might have calculated would give him a decisive edge in cartographic publishing in the 1630s. Ultimately, the plans to invite Galileo came to nothing, as the astronomer pleaded that ill health (and undoubtedly the terms of his house arrest by the Inquisition) prevented him from making what would have been a sensational defection to Europe’s leading Calvinist republic. [5099: è la storia che ho raccontato qui]
It was the product of a Dutch Republic that, following its violent struggle to break free of the Spanish Empire, created a global marketplace that preferred the accumulation of wealth over the acquisition of territory. Blaeu produced an atlas that was ultimately driven by the same imperatives. For him, it was not even necessary to place Amsterdam at the centre of such a world; Dutch financial power was increasingly pervasive but it was also invisible, seeping into every corner of the globe. In the seventeenth century as today, financial markets make little acknowledgement of political boundaries and centres when it comes to the accumulation of riches. [5359]
One toise was 6 French feet, or just under 2 metres […] [5532]
Newton concluded that the earth was not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid, slightly bulging at the equator and flattened at the poles. Cassini I and his son Jacques (Cassini II) were unconvinced, and followed the theories of René Descartes (1596–1650). Revered across Europe as the great philosopher of the mind, Descartes was also renowned as a ‘geometer’, or applied mathematician, who put forward the argument that the earth was a prolate ellipsoid, bulging at the poles but flatter at the equator, like an egg. His theory was widely accepted by the Académie, and the resolution of the controversy soon became a matter of national pride on both sides of the English Channel. [5589]
Ultimately, the Carte de Cassini was more than just a national survey. It enabled individuals to understand themselves as part of a nation. Today, in a world almost exclusively defined by the nation state, to say that people saw a place called ‘France’ when they looked at Cassini’s map of the country, and identified themselves as ‘French’ citizens living within its space seems patently obvious, but this was not the case at the end of the eighteenth century. Contrary to the rhetoric of nationalism, nations are not born naturally. They are invented at certain moments in history by the exigencies of political ideology. It is no coincidence that the dawn of the age of nationalism in the eighteenth century coincides almost exactly with the Cassini surveys and that ‘nationalism’ as a term was coined in the 1790s, just as the Cassini maps were nationalized in the name of the French Republic.
In his classic study of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the roots of national consciousness grew out of the long historical erosion of religious belief and imperial dynasties. As the certainty of religious salvation waned, the empires of the ancien régime in Europe slowly disintegrated. In the realm of personal belief, nationalism provided the compelling consolation of what Anderson calls ‘a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning’. [6046]
The consequence of all these changes was the emergence of a new genre, thematic mapping. A thematic map portrays the geographical nature of a variety of physical, and social, phenomena, and depicts the spatial distribution and variation of a chosen subject or theme which is usually invisible, such as crime, disease or poverty. Although used as early as the 1680s in meteorological charts drawn by Edmund Halley, thematic maps developed rapidly from the early 1800s with the growth in quantitative statistical methods and public censuses. The development of probability theory and the ability to regulate error in statistical analysis allowed the social sciences to compile vast amounts of data, including national censuses. In 1801 France and England conducted censuses to measure and classify their populations. [6169]
When Joseph Conrad’s protagonist Marlow peers at an imperial map in Heart of Darkness (1899), ‘marked with all the colours of the rainbow’, he is pleased to see ‘a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’. [6205]
One of the society’s councillors, the distinguished explorer and pioneering eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, responded with concerns about Mackinder’s attempt to claim geography as a science. Nevertheless, he was sympathetic to the moves to adopt geography as an academic discipline, and remarked that, whatever the limitations of his paper, he was sure Mackinder ‘was destined to leave his mark on geographical education’. Galton knew more than he admitted: he was already in talks with the authorities at both Oxford and Cambridge universities to appoint an RGS-funded reader in the subject, a society aspiration that stretched back to the early 1870s, and had stage-managed Mackinder’s invitation so that he would emerge as the most obvious candidate for any new post. On 24 May 1887, less than four months after Mackinder’s talk, Oxford University agreed to establish a five-year Readership in Geography, supported by RGS funds. The following month Mackinder was formally appointed, on a yearly salary of £300. [6321: anche Galton è un nostro vecchio amico, come si illustra qui]
[…] the disastrous Boer War (1899–1902), which had cost Britain more than £220 million, as well as the loss of 8,000 troops killed in action and a further 13,000 to disease. Of the estimated 32,000 Boers who died, the vast majority were women and children who died in British ‘concentration camps’, the first time such methods had been used in modern warfare. [6475]
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. [6916]
For Google, one justification of its geospatial applications is that the digital image of the earth becomes the medium through which all information is accessed; writing in 2007, Michael T. Jones claimed that Google ‘inverts the roles of Web browser as application and map as content, resulting in an experience where the planet itself is the browser’. The Earth application – according to Google – is the first place a viewer goes to access and view information. This seems, for the moment at least, to be a completely pure definition of a world map made up from its own cultural beliefs and assumptions, all of which are now potentially available at the click of a computer mouse. [7733]
In 1970, the American geographer Waldo Tobler famously invoked what he called ‘the first law of geography: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’. [7747]
pretty slow read, but easy to put down and come back to later
(2.5/5)
Brotton's central idea - that maps are representations of a society's way of seeing the world - is persuasive and simple. Each chapter is tuned to it and contributes. The central story of transition and connection though, is often missing. I found each chapter to be an interesting premise for a short book or an article, but the thread connecting the maps gets dropped on more than one occasion in a noticeable way. General interest reading, not bad, but not a highly immersive work.
Brotton's central idea - that maps are representations of a society's way of seeing the world - is persuasive and simple. Each chapter is tuned to it and contributes. The central story of transition and connection though, is often missing. I found each chapter to be an interesting premise for a short book or an article, but the thread connecting the maps gets dropped on more than one occasion in a noticeable way. General interest reading, not bad, but not a highly immersive work.
In the vein of many current texts. More a history of mapmaking than a history through mapmaking. Some questionable historical summaries when it strays from cartography.
The 12 selected maps are a good choice for the book, and provide the needed variety for the author's central tenet that maps tell the story of their creators and their culture as much as the places they depict.
The chapter on the Peters projection was enlightening, did not realise the negative reaction he got from contemporary cartographers.
Only two maps from outside the western canon: would have liked a few more such as Polynesian sailing maps.
The chapter on the Peters projection was enlightening, did not realise the negative reaction he got from contemporary cartographers.
Only two maps from outside the western canon: would have liked a few more such as Polynesian sailing maps.
In lots of ways this is a fascinating book, picking up on the trend to look at a historical subject in the context of a single item or area. It was first started by the book A History of the World in 100 Objects.
There are lots of images of ancient maps, the detail and depth that the book goes into are impressive, and the credentials of the author are impeccable. And yet it doesn’t work for me. There is a mass of detail in here, from some of the very first maps by Ptolemy and other significant ones like the Mappi Mundi in Hereford cathedral, to the Mercer projection and the origins of the OS, and onto Google earth. It covers all the really important maps and individuals involved in the creation of those maps, and has some superb images of the maps in colour.
What makes this book so difficult to read is the text; it feels like it is written like a academic paper most of the time. It does improve towards the end, but it did make it very hard reading for most of the book, and that is a shame.
There are lots of images of ancient maps, the detail and depth that the book goes into are impressive, and the credentials of the author are impeccable. And yet it doesn’t work for me. There is a mass of detail in here, from some of the very first maps by Ptolemy and other significant ones like the Mappi Mundi in Hereford cathedral, to the Mercer projection and the origins of the OS, and onto Google earth. It covers all the really important maps and individuals involved in the creation of those maps, and has some superb images of the maps in colour.
What makes this book so difficult to read is the text; it feels like it is written like a academic paper most of the time. It does improve towards the end, but it did make it very hard reading for most of the book, and that is a shame.
Maps are sexy. They are rich founts of information in text and picture form: layers of semantics crowded on rectangles or squares of paper, pixels of possibility on a 3D representation of the world. They are an essential form of communication, but they are often overlooked. Let’s face it: we take maps for granted. This is especially true now that Google and other companies have made it easy to explore the Earth virtually. As these tools become commonplace, the technology fades into the background and becomes more like a pencil (a piece of technology, but one so familiar as to be rather unremarkable) than a supercomputer. So it behoves us to stop and consider the staggering achievement that is mapping, particularly when so much of what we know stretches all the way back to a time before we had precise ways to measure time and space. Contrary to popular belief, the ancient Greeks figured out that the Earth was round pretty quickly. And Plato’s imaginary depiction of the Earth as observed from space is similar to what we actually found when we finally made it up there in the twentieth century.
Jerry Brotton has written a history of the world, and he chose to do it through maps. Make no mistake, though: A History of the World in Twelve Maps is mostly about maps. Shocking, I know. For the history component, he traces the social and scientific forces that influenced the production of the different maps he discusses. He links mapmaking to the search for knowledge as well as our desire to organize that knowledge. Finally, he explains how different maps served different purposes—some practical, some political, but all philosophical. Mapmaking is both a science and an art, but regardless of its classification, it is an ideological exercise.
One striking thing about this book is its remarkable evenness. I find that with non-fiction that takes a segmented approach like this, most books tend to be uneven: a few chapters are very interesting, most are reasonably interesting, and then a few are just not that satisfying—kind of a normal curve of chapter quality, if you will. This isn’t the case here. I’m not saying that every chapter is amazing, and I raced through some while lingering in others. But every chapter is informative, interesting, and intriguing in its own way. Brotton has selected a good sample of maps throughout the ages. He begins each chapter by introducing the map (or mapmaker) before backtracking, explaining the historical context in which the map arose. From this, we come to understand how the drive for the acquisition of knowledge in Alexandria influenced Ptolemy’s groundbreaking maps based on geometry. We learn how the relationships between China, Japan, and Korea influenced the mapping of North Korea in the sixteenth century. We learn how revolutionary France delayed the completion of the most ambitious survey project for its time, and property disputes in England resulted in British Africa and India being better-mapped than the UK.
Got all that? Good, there’s a test at the end.
As you might have gathered, there is a lot in this book. It was a good deal, considering that it comes with two sections full of colour plates of various maps. Brotton has obviously done the research (which, much to my pleasure, he has meticulously documented in endnotes). The result is an information-dense look at history and mapmaking, and while this is never boring or dry, at times it is a little overwhelming. I’m not sure how much I will retain a month or a year after reading this book.
This is always a danger with these kinds of books, and it’s a difficult pitfall to avoid. By covering so many topics, even with the depth and interest that Brotton displays, A History of the World in Twelve Maps becomes little more than a survey of world history. Entire books can be (and have been) written about Ptolemy, or revolutionary France, or Mercator. Still, this is a minor complaint—and, considering I’m complaining about how much the book tells me, not really a complaint at all. If anything, this just means that I have a better idea of which books to seek out next....
In this respect, A History of the World in Twelve Maps reminds me a great deal of A Short History of Nearly Everything, a similarly sprawling survey of history through the lens of scientific discovery. I love the latter so much, and while Brotton’s style isn’t quite as engaging or stimulating, he manages to replicate a lot of the sense of wonder that Bryson creates. He communicates how polarizing the use of maps was in sixteenth century Europe, when Castile and Portugal were fighting over the rights to the entire world. He replicates the excitement that must have been palpable for those mapmakers involved in the surveying of eighteenth-century France. These days, maps are a commodity (or a service)—then, maps were a staggering achievement of science, art, and engineering.
As a mathematician, I particularly enjoyed when Brotton mentioned the mathematics behind mapmaking. The Earth is round (an oblate spheroid, to be pedantic about it), and it is not possible to project the curved surface of the Earth onto a 2-dimensional piece of paper with perfect fidelity. You either get distorted areas or distorted angles (or both), which means your map will look funny, or it will be useless for navigation, generally considered two very important aspects of a map. For as long as we have been making maps, we’ve tried to determine the best way to approximate the 3-d curvature of the Earth on a 2-d piece of paper. (Brotton also goes Borgesian and talks about how we can’t have a "perfect map" unless the scale is 1:1, which would be silly. I remember talking about this back in my Philosophy of Science class days.) Now, for those of you who have been reading this paragraph and are about to scramble wildly to cancel your Amazon order, wait! There are no complicated equations in here, no mathematical sleights of hand. Brotton merely mentions the tricky and impressive math involved (or highlights when some, like Mercator, deduce a projection without knowledge of the math involved). So it’s possible to appreciate the beautiful and necessary mathematics here without becoming drawn in too deep.
Of course, as with any survey-type book of history, there are things that Brotton left out that I would have liked to see. He laudably devotes a chapter to China and Korea, but the rest of the book is very much about the Western world. Absent is any discussion of Australian Aboriginal songlines or the mapping techniques of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Brotton describes attempts to map Africa but spends no time discussing how the indigenous inhabitants found their way around for tens of thousands of years. Of course, it’s true that many of these cultures don’t have maps in the conventional sense; they rely on oral tradition and reckoning by the sun and the stars. Even if that is the case, Brotton makes a passionate plea for a very open definition of a map in his introduction. He doesn’t want to limit himself to discussing small rectangles of paper—and so, it would have been nice to see him branch out some more.
The book is at its best when Brotton explains how the desires or aims of a government or an individual influenced the development and deployment of maps in that time period. (I was very fascinated by his recounting of the conflict between Castile and Portugal and Magellan’s subsequent, ill-fated circumnavigation.) He makes it very clear that mapmaking is not something done in isolation; it is a political and philosophical activity that relies as much on the allegiances of the mapmaker as it does the objectivity of the Earth’s landscape and geography. The premise, telling the history (or selected parts of history) through maps is quite cool. Brotton largely succeeds at what he sets out as his mission in the introduction. At times the information he includes is a little much for a book of this type, but that’s not a deal-breaker. With amazing maps and enthusiastic explanations, Brotton educates and captivates.
Jerry Brotton has written a history of the world, and he chose to do it through maps. Make no mistake, though: A History of the World in Twelve Maps is mostly about maps. Shocking, I know. For the history component, he traces the social and scientific forces that influenced the production of the different maps he discusses. He links mapmaking to the search for knowledge as well as our desire to organize that knowledge. Finally, he explains how different maps served different purposes—some practical, some political, but all philosophical. Mapmaking is both a science and an art, but regardless of its classification, it is an ideological exercise.
One striking thing about this book is its remarkable evenness. I find that with non-fiction that takes a segmented approach like this, most books tend to be uneven: a few chapters are very interesting, most are reasonably interesting, and then a few are just not that satisfying—kind of a normal curve of chapter quality, if you will. This isn’t the case here. I’m not saying that every chapter is amazing, and I raced through some while lingering in others. But every chapter is informative, interesting, and intriguing in its own way. Brotton has selected a good sample of maps throughout the ages. He begins each chapter by introducing the map (or mapmaker) before backtracking, explaining the historical context in which the map arose. From this, we come to understand how the drive for the acquisition of knowledge in Alexandria influenced Ptolemy’s groundbreaking maps based on geometry. We learn how the relationships between China, Japan, and Korea influenced the mapping of North Korea in the sixteenth century. We learn how revolutionary France delayed the completion of the most ambitious survey project for its time, and property disputes in England resulted in British Africa and India being better-mapped than the UK.
Got all that? Good, there’s a test at the end.
As you might have gathered, there is a lot in this book. It was a good deal, considering that it comes with two sections full of colour plates of various maps. Brotton has obviously done the research (which, much to my pleasure, he has meticulously documented in endnotes). The result is an information-dense look at history and mapmaking, and while this is never boring or dry, at times it is a little overwhelming. I’m not sure how much I will retain a month or a year after reading this book.
This is always a danger with these kinds of books, and it’s a difficult pitfall to avoid. By covering so many topics, even with the depth and interest that Brotton displays, A History of the World in Twelve Maps becomes little more than a survey of world history. Entire books can be (and have been) written about Ptolemy, or revolutionary France, or Mercator. Still, this is a minor complaint—and, considering I’m complaining about how much the book tells me, not really a complaint at all. If anything, this just means that I have a better idea of which books to seek out next....
In this respect, A History of the World in Twelve Maps reminds me a great deal of A Short History of Nearly Everything, a similarly sprawling survey of history through the lens of scientific discovery. I love the latter so much, and while Brotton’s style isn’t quite as engaging or stimulating, he manages to replicate a lot of the sense of wonder that Bryson creates. He communicates how polarizing the use of maps was in sixteenth century Europe, when Castile and Portugal were fighting over the rights to the entire world. He replicates the excitement that must have been palpable for those mapmakers involved in the surveying of eighteenth-century France. These days, maps are a commodity (or a service)—then, maps were a staggering achievement of science, art, and engineering.
As a mathematician, I particularly enjoyed when Brotton mentioned the mathematics behind mapmaking. The Earth is round (an oblate spheroid, to be pedantic about it), and it is not possible to project the curved surface of the Earth onto a 2-dimensional piece of paper with perfect fidelity. You either get distorted areas or distorted angles (or both), which means your map will look funny, or it will be useless for navigation, generally considered two very important aspects of a map. For as long as we have been making maps, we’ve tried to determine the best way to approximate the 3-d curvature of the Earth on a 2-d piece of paper. (Brotton also goes Borgesian and talks about how we can’t have a "perfect map" unless the scale is 1:1, which would be silly. I remember talking about this back in my Philosophy of Science class days.) Now, for those of you who have been reading this paragraph and are about to scramble wildly to cancel your Amazon order, wait! There are no complicated equations in here, no mathematical sleights of hand. Brotton merely mentions the tricky and impressive math involved (or highlights when some, like Mercator, deduce a projection without knowledge of the math involved). So it’s possible to appreciate the beautiful and necessary mathematics here without becoming drawn in too deep.
Of course, as with any survey-type book of history, there are things that Brotton left out that I would have liked to see. He laudably devotes a chapter to China and Korea, but the rest of the book is very much about the Western world. Absent is any discussion of Australian Aboriginal songlines or the mapping techniques of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Brotton describes attempts to map Africa but spends no time discussing how the indigenous inhabitants found their way around for tens of thousands of years. Of course, it’s true that many of these cultures don’t have maps in the conventional sense; they rely on oral tradition and reckoning by the sun and the stars. Even if that is the case, Brotton makes a passionate plea for a very open definition of a map in his introduction. He doesn’t want to limit himself to discussing small rectangles of paper—and so, it would have been nice to see him branch out some more.
The book is at its best when Brotton explains how the desires or aims of a government or an individual influenced the development and deployment of maps in that time period. (I was very fascinated by his recounting of the conflict between Castile and Portugal and Magellan’s subsequent, ill-fated circumnavigation.) He makes it very clear that mapmaking is not something done in isolation; it is a political and philosophical activity that relies as much on the allegiances of the mapmaker as it does the objectivity of the Earth’s landscape and geography. The premise, telling the history (or selected parts of history) through maps is quite cool. Brotton largely succeeds at what he sets out as his mission in the introduction. At times the information he includes is a little much for a book of this type, but that’s not a deal-breaker. With amazing maps and enthusiastic explanations, Brotton educates and captivates.
In lots of ways this is a fascinating book, picking up on the trend to look at a historical subject in the context of a single item or area. It was first started by the book A History of the World in 100 Objects.
There are lots of images of ancient maps, the detail and depth that the book goes into are impressive, and the credentials of the author are impeccable. And yet it doesn’t work for me. There is a mass of detail in here, from some of the very first maps by Ptolemy and other significant ones like the Mappi Mundi in Hereford cathedral, to the Mercer projection and the origins of the OS, and onto Google earth. It covers all the really important maps and individuals involved in the creation of those maps, and has some superb images of the maps in colour.
What makes this book so difficult to read is the text; it feels like it is written like a academic paper most of the time. It does improve towards the end, but it did make it very hard reading for most of the book, and that is a shame.
There are lots of images of ancient maps, the detail and depth that the book goes into are impressive, and the credentials of the author are impeccable. And yet it doesn’t work for me. There is a mass of detail in here, from some of the very first maps by Ptolemy and other significant ones like the Mappi Mundi in Hereford cathedral, to the Mercer projection and the origins of the OS, and onto Google earth. It covers all the really important maps and individuals involved in the creation of those maps, and has some superb images of the maps in colour.
What makes this book so difficult to read is the text; it feels like it is written like a academic paper most of the time. It does improve towards the end, but it did make it very hard reading for most of the book, and that is a shame.
Although this book is a solid history of the development of the art and science of mapmaking, what Brotton really excels at is demonstrating that maps are so much more than images that have simply improved and become more accurate over time. Rather, he makes the case that maps are markers of the dominant science, religion, technology, geopolitics, anthropology and philosophy of culture through time. Brotton chooses the twelve maps -- not all world maps -- with care, and they go a long way towards proving his thesis. An excellent read for anyone interested in history in general, not just those inexplicably drawn to maps.