A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton (review)

Jerry Brotton’s time- and space-slicing survey of world maps is less a history of the world in 12 maps and more a map of the world in 12 maps. It takes the ideas of cartographic selection and generalization seriously and applies them to a historiography of maps that is both innovative and exciting to read. Through the first few chapters (up to and including chapter 7 on Mercator), cartographers are shown to struggle to overcome the legacy of Ptolemy and his world-defining projections. By later chapters, it is clear to the reader that maps reflect the cultures and world views of their makers and that those cultures are constantly changing across time and space. As cultures and the technologies those cultures produce evolve, so do their maps. At the same time, the most technically sophisticated maps are demonstrated to be those most suited to state and colonial, commercial, and empire-building projects, up to and including Google Earth and Google Maps.

A representative sampling of maps is shown, through successive chapters, to have served particular ideologies, including science, exchange, faith, empire, discovery, globalism, toleration, money, nation, geopolitics, equality, and information. Through the varying terrain of these 12 chapters (in addition to an extra concluding chapter that is a real “bonus”), Brotton maintains a critical and scholarly cartographic gaze in the tradition of J.B. Harley, while moving a considerable distance beyond his deconstructive predecessor. Brotton is part of a “next generation” of critical cartographers confident in the groundwork that has been laid by Denis Wood, John Pickles, Eric Sheppard, Michael Curry, and other early critics of the cartographic gaze. Cartography has largely moved beyond the need to rely heavily on post-structuralisms that ironically (and not intentionally) seemed to create binaries between experts in geospatial technologies, who often took top-down, god-like views upon the world, and “others,” mostly human geographers, who saw the early technologies as hopelessly determined by positivistic ideologies.

Brotton clearly adopts some tools of the former (geospatial experts) to serve the aims of the latter (humanistic geographers). Evolutionary metaphors pervade A History as cartographers are increasingly able to realize the dream of a 1:1 map of the world that conquers the millennia-long battle to square the circle, or to find a perfect way to project the round globe on the flat (square) surface of a map. Google has achieved both in one fell swoop: 1:1 scales are easily achievable on the Internet, and Google has also squared the circle, ironically by using a projection originally created by Ptolemy that takes a bird’s-eye-angled view of the globe from a high altitude. The evolutionary metaphor is decidedly non-teleological, and the various technical feats are ultimately placed within a framework of failure. The dream of a perfect map is ultimately not achievable, because it is decidedly non-technical in nature. It is, rather, ideological.

The Enlightenment “belief in scientifically accurate standardized realism” (p. 440) contains a universalizing impulse that is ultimately at odds with particulars of global difference and diversity as drivers of commercial interests (p. 444). On the other hand, an impulse to consume the products of universalizing cartographic projects is quite evident in A History as, starting with Joan Blaeu and as described in the chapter titled “Money,” the purchase of an atlas started to become accessible to (initially rich) members of the general public. French nation-building efforts led by the Cassini family, both before and after the revolution, brought the accessibility bar even lower as technologies became more efficient, driving down prices so that middle-class consumers could now own copies of maps. Before the advent of Google Earth, the Peters projection map was the best-selling map of all time for a few decades, marketed using an essentially Marxist strategy. The Peters controversy revolved around the alleged perfection contained within his map (and an ideology...