The flags of nations depicting the territories of the nations of
the world as mapped out on a "globe" give some sense of the relative
size of these territories. Maps and mapping are part of a problem when
it comes to seeing the relative proportionality of land surface areas.
The mapping techniques that we use to represent the world in which we live, navigate oceans, colonize peoples, the use of the term "we" is not a reference to a collective of all peoples and places.
It is the prerogative of the European, and North American empire builders, and to facilitate the means to carving out "their" territories.
Hailed by British cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson as ‘the greatest political cartoon ever,’ James Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in Danger
is typical of the Georgian-era caricaturist’s biting satire. Drawn in
1805, the cartoon depicts French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and British
prime minister William Pitt greedily carving a plum pudding shaped like
the world in an amusing metaphor for the leaders’ battle for
geopolitical power. It has been widely pastiched by later artists
including Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.
The British Empire is rendered in "pink". Cartography in the iconography of British imperialism portrayed the visual culture of the British Empire. The Empire came to cover huge swathes of territory and from the nineteenth century onwards, Commonwealth countries were coloured pink on maps. Pink was a printer’s compromise for letters overprinted to be clearly read, as the colour that was traditionally associated with the British Empire is red.
Commonwealth historian Linda Colley, commenting on an Imperial Federation map depicting the extent of the British Empire in 1886, noted that the globe is depicted using the Mercator projection, centered on the Greenwich meridian. The effect of the image, she argued, is to conceal the territorial fragility of British imperialism by underlining its global reach. Thus, the viewer neglects the small territory of islands that the world-dominating United Kingdom consists of. Subsequently, the vast stretches of pink are presented as connected and homogeneous, though several parts of the empire were dealt separately and were held with different levels of power.
Maps, being part of the British ‘mental furniture’ clearly depict one thing: the imperial fantasy perceiving Britannia rightfully ruling its subjects from the top of the world. This subsequently led to jingoism, disguised behind the excuse of civilizing missionizing. The British tried to pursue the cleansing of the savage colonial residences, producing ‘racial progress’, but achieved a division and gap with ‘otherness’ by vast exploitation.
For many Britons who were not members of the upper and higher middle classes, there was, however, a surprising ignorance about the Imperial world. Geography was hardly taught at all in state schools attended by working class children during Victoria’s reign. The idea of every classroom having a huge map covered in pink in every classroom is erroneous. The Empire was an elite concern and the upper classes, in practice, did not want to broaden the lower orders’ horizons in anyway that might have prejudiced their privileged position in society. So while a map painted pink was an expression of British power in the world, access to those maps and wider education about the Empire was about power and control between the classes within Britain itself.
So, the ordinary map of the world, and NOT hanging on the school room wall, if we understand its history correctly, is an amalgam of both geography and ideology.
The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries – particularly in the case of the African continent.
Mercator’s map inadvertently also pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth’s surface, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%.
As the animated gif below – created by Reddit user, neilrkaye – demonstrates, northern nations such as Canada and Russia have been artifiically “pumped up” in the minds of many people around the world.
Voter turnout cartogram . . .
The Conversation article end with this example of an alternative mapping tool:
Another way of representing the world is to display countries’ sizes in proportion to key indicators of interest to geographers today, such as population, environment and development. Predictably, the world map of GDP is dominated by North America and Europe, while Africa almost disappears. The population cartogram gives greater prominence to India and China, and makes Indonesia far bigger than neighbouring Australia. But perhaps more surprising is the map of voter turnout, where emerging economies are bigger – and North America smaller – than many people might suppose.
Now more than ever, we need to be able to see the world from different perspectives. Any one perspective is not any more correct than another – just different.
No comments:
Post a Comment