The map is not the territory: despite their scientific aims, maps are always subjective, and intimately linked to the context in which they are born. Cartographers don’t just represent the world ; they build it.
A long journey
Jerry Brotton, professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, offers a long journey through time and space by observing twelve maps of the world, from Geography from Ptolemy to Google Earth. The work is enriched with thirty-six black and white illustrations and notebooks of fifty-two color maps, including the twelve central maps, commented throughout the text: The Geography of Ptolemy (around 150 AD), Entertainment of Al-Idrissi (1154), the world map of Hereford (around the year 1300), the Kangnido world map (1402), the planisphere of Martin Waldseemüller (1507), universal map of Diego Ribeiro (1529), world map of Gérald Mercator (1569), Atlas maior by Joan Blaeu (1662), map of France from the Cassini family (1793), “ the geographical pivot of history » by Halford Mackinder (1904), the Peters projection (1973) and Google Earth (2012).
Joan Blaeu, author of the magisterial Maior Atlas which enjoyed immense European success from its publication in 1662, sent a French version to King Louis XIV supplemented by a comment on the importance of the subject covered: “ Geography is the eye and light of history », paraphrasing Abraham Ortelius, author in 1570 of Theatrum orbi terrarum, the ancient theatron being the place of the spectacle. The cards deploy a version steeped in imagination of a reality that we think we know but which finds itself transformed by its representation. The map is a memory of the journey, a mirror often reflecting the compromises and imagination that went into its design. The power of the cards is “ Contemplate without leaving our home, and right before our eyes, the things furthest from us “.
What maps all have in common is that they cannot represent the earth exhaustively on a flat surface. Jerry Brotton concludes: “ Regardless, no card will show “ the world as it really is » because it is not representable. There simply is no accurate map of the world and there never will be. The paradox being that we can neither know the world without the map nor represent it once and for all thanks to it. “.
The maps offer unique images of their time and place of creation, and are therefore very different ; from Greek circles to Chinese squares and Enlightenment triangles, maps are a “ proposition about the world, not a simple reflection and each of these propositions results from hypotheses and particular concerns, specific to the culture then in force. The relationship between maps and these conceptions of the world is always reciprocal, but not necessarily fixed or lasting. Hereford’s mappa mundi provides a Christian vision of Creation and predicts the end of the world ; the Kangnido card places an imperial power at the center of its world. Both are consistent with the cultures that saw them born. ; and yet, they also go beyond these belief systems because they aspire to a global vision of the world “.
The major interest of the work lies in the detailed analysis of this reciprocity between image maps dated from the world then known, and image maps born from it. The maps allow us to understand the dominant figure of the drawing period. The twelve chapters of the work are organized around this main idea associated with the map chosen, i.e. in chronological order: science (Ptolemy), exchanges (Al-Idrisi), faith (Hereford), empire (Kangnido), discovery (Waldseemüller), (first) globalization (Ribeiro), tolerance (Mercator), money (Blaeu), the nation (Cassini), geopolitics (Mackinder), equality (Peters) and information (Google Earth).
Cards and powers
In a very rich work, let us highlight some transversal theses. The author points out that the card’s stroke of genius is to invite humans to take flight and contemplate the earth from above from a divine perspective. Looking at the map is to believe for a moment that the perspective from above, allowing us to embrace the world, is very real. And throughout his journey through time the author shows the difficult and slow transition from cosmography to cartography. The very first map of the world is Babylonian, a wax tablet measuring 12 x 8 cm, which shows mountains, channels, marshes and the central hole of the Euphrates. Babylon is the world ; the tablet is the preserve of the religious or civil elite, the only ones capable of understanding the secrets of creation.
Ptolemy, an astronomer and mathematician, probably never drew a map but wrote a geography textbook that was influential until the Renaissance. But Ptolemy, like Strabo, assigned to geography a broader intellectual research function making it possible to explain, through text and images, the origin of the cosmos and the place of humanity. And Ptolemy’s mapped world is geocentric.
Before Mercator and Blaeu, religious visions of the world dominated in Europe. With the great discoveries and the rise of distant navigations for mercantile purposes, there was a slow transition from cosmography to cartography. It took fifteen centuries for geocentrism to give way to heliocentrism (with Copernicus, 1543). Commercial concerns (the Atlas market), strategic concerns (the secret of maritime routes jealously guarded by the VOCthe Dutch East India Company) and policies (with Cassini) denote a new philosophy of the world: the earth (and humans) is no longer at the center of the universe and the work of cartographers and geographers was totally subject to the institutions, the State or commercial companies. Blaeu’s world map from 1648 is reproduced on the floor of the Citizens’ Hall of the new Amsterdam City Hall inaugurated in 1655, the new center of power: three marble circles representing the hemispheres (western terrestrial, boreal celestial and eastern terrestrial). Citizens could enjoy a unique sensation, that of crossing the planet on foot. They become fond of atlases, which demonstrate the effect of maps in the service of power: “ contemplate without leaving our home and right before our eyes the things furthest from us “.
Westphalian Europe became a vast workshop for the production of imperial (Habsburg, Bourbon) and national maps, so that the authorities had more accurate representations of their territories, soon limited by limits fixed by treaties. The Cassini dynasty innovated by establishing the principles of Western cartography as we know it, once resolved the ancestral question of longitude, a spatial measurement corresponding to a temporal gap. Colbert generously financed the work of the Royal Academy of Sciences because he expected irrefutable information from it in order to give shape to the absolute monarchy. Even if it means admitting that the surface area of French territory measured from the new meridian of Paris was reduced by a sixth. The Convention decided to nationalize a private cartographic project carried out by the Société de la carte de France ; surveys, maps and archives were transferred to the War Depot. Cassini’s map in 182 sheets, an unprecedented advance in the history of cartography, was the first general map of a nation based on geodetic and topographical measurement. The nation was visualized and unified since each toponym was written in Paris French. Horizontal perspective of the earth, and no longer vertical (divine) in which each meter of the territory had the same value. Later, a new survey became the “ staff map “. The connection between cartography and strategy became explicit and has flourished since.
Karl Ritter, founder of the Berlin Geographical Society, coined the word Kartograph in 1828 ; a year later, the rival French school put forward the term “ cartographic » ; Sir Richard Burton adopted that of cartography in 1859, during an expedition financed by the Royal Geographical Society and intended to explore the Africa of the Great Lakes, soon followed by cartographer in 1863. The rivalry between empires for the partition of Africa, still little known, was launched. It remains at the strategic level and continues to be expressed on the basis of lasting representations of the world. The author rightly emphasizes the importance of the speech given by Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) in 1904 to the Royal Geographical Society in London in which he identified “ the geographical pivot of history », which he located in Eurasia. Vitality of a representation opposing the center of Eurasia as a pivot (whoever controls it will dominate the world) and peripheral crescents. It is often considered as the matrix of the strategy of “ containment » American against the Soviet Union. It is also remarkable that it was taken up by Henry Kissinger (hence the recognition of China to separate it from Moscow), Zbigniew Brzezinski (the world as a geopolitical chessboard, to be controlled from the margins of the Middle East and Africa, stakeholders of a “ arc of crises “) and more recently Hillary Clinton (not cited by the author), promoter of the famous “ pivot » from the United States towards Asia, that is to say facing China.
The final chapter is devoted to Google Earth, an application to which he attributes the merit of zooming in to surface details but which he considers to be heir to Ptolemy’s vertical perspective projection. The fear of new geospatial applications is reminiscent of those linked to previous innovations. Google’s monopolistic power over the entire world is mitigated, according to the American firm, by the fact that its online maps make us the last generation to know what “it” means. to be lost “. Is it certain ? Is it even desirable to lose the poetry of representations of the world? ? There “ card for everyone » closes a social evolution that began with the Babylonian tablet, the preserve of the religious or civil elite. The digital data which makes it possible to track each individual carries the risk of a loss of freedom, in favor of advertising and suggestive targeting of the individual reduced to their status of nomadic customer.
Remains, concludes the author, this paradox that we cannot know the external world without the map nor represent it once and for all thanks to it. An observation that should be shared (even if we must regret the absence of reference to French work on the issues studied), regarding this mysterious object, the map, which oscillates between realities and representations, crossings and visions of the world.