Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, and: The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps (review)

The British Library has played an important role in the growing scholarship around the history of cartography and has published many significant books on the subject including Alfred Hiatt's Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (2008) and Alessandro Scafi's Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (2006). These are meticulously researched, scholarly books. The Library has also published more popular, lavishly illustrated works, of which these two are good examples. They follow a simple format: a series of short chapters, each of which is accompanied by a series of illustrated examples with detailed explanatory entries. While both books conform to this format, they also make an interesting contrast. Peter Whitfield's The Image of the World is a new edition of a 1994 work, while that by Peter Barber and Tom Harper reveals how much the field has developed since the earlier work appeared.

When it first appeared, Whitfield's book reflected a new approach to cartographical history that re-examined the merits of these maps not just in terms of scientific accuracy but also linked them to their historical context, to the histories of ideas and of art. The book benefits from the work of such scholars as Peter Barber and David Woodward, and the multi-volume The History of Cartography, the first volume of which appeared in 1987. It begins by briefly outlining the classical antecedents, including Ptolemy, although the sequence of maps begins with the medieval mappamundi, including the Beatus and Evesham examples, the latter a new discovery when the book first appeared. It also includes individual examples from contemporary Jainist, Islamic, and Chinese map-making. The range of maps is impressive, with the majority coming from the sixteenth century, and surprisingly few from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Despite Whitfield's constant referral to the political and social assumptions made in the construction of these maps, the book is very British, or rather Eurocentric in focus. The absence of the 'radical' Australian critique of world maps, McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World, first published in 1979, is surprising, but even more surprising is the reproduction of Al-Idrisi's 1456 map that is 'inverted for the sake of clarity', so that north is shown at the top. Whitfield also describes a 1906 'Pirate-Traveller' map as 'Pacific-centric' because of the attention given to the west coast of the Americas, despite the absence of most Pacific nations and only fragments of Australia and New Zealand.

For me, some of the most annoying features of this book are technical, although some are also scholarly. Several maps are not precisely registered so that there is a noticeable blurring of colours and text, while the reproductions do not have the precision such detailed artefacts require. The spreading of many of these maps across two pages also results in some crucial elements being lost in the fold. Another inexplicable design decision was the colourization of some maps 'in the style of the period'. This is also so clumsily done that fine details are obscured. And why have the provenance and library references been excluded? Scale and medium are also left out from the image descriptions. To be fair, a later book by Whitfield, London: A life in maps (2006) does include such details and also reflects a more scholarly approach.

Barber and Harper's reproductions are much more carefully printed, probably reflecting the continuing improvements in print technology, although there are still the frustrations of two-page spreads. The captions are sufficiently detailed to satisfy the most pedantic of academics and contain enough information to enable the motivated to track down the originals of these images. Indeed Whitfield's book looks...