Map Projections &
Their Effects on
Perceptions in
the Study of
World History
Ms. Patricia Cutaia
White Plains H. S. White Plains, NY
Medieval European T-O Map. In medieval Europe one of the
most common forms of rendering the earth was the mappae
mundi of which more than a thousand have survived. The T-O
map is one kind of mappae mundi. The T-O image reproduced
here comes from the encyclopedia of knowledge produced by
Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in 630 A.D., and was printed in
Augsburg in 1472.
The Maya Cosmos. Adopted with modifications from Linda Schele and
David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya
(N.Y.: William Morrow, 1990), p. 67, fig. 2:1. Drawing by Linda Schele,
courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.
(permissions Nov. 7, 2002).
An ancient map that strongly suggests Chinese sailors were first to round the world. It seems more likely
that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets
roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical
records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called "The Marvellous Visions
of the Star Raft". One of Zheng He's fleet's adventures, blown off course to the east to the New World,
provides a fascinating thread in Neil Stephenson's fabulous fiction, Cryptonomicon. It is a copy, made in
1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book .
Each fleet would have at least one "Treasure ship", used by the commander of the fleet and his deputies
(nine-masted, about 120 meters (400 ft) long and 50 m (160 ft) wide).
The greatest "inventor" of sixteenth century Europe was map maker
Gerhardus Mercator whose 1569 summary map, publicized by the learned
Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the
English Nation (London: 1589), liberated cartography from dependence on
Ptolemy, and included a projection that allowed navigators to understand the
coasts of the New World.
These maps silently promoted a Eurocentric view that privileged the Western
image. Generations of European and American students have been
indoctrinated with the glories of nationalism and colonialism through this map.
A modern modification of the Mercator projection is Miller's
cylindrical projection that decreases the amount of distortion in
the high latitudes while setting the earth's surface on a rectangular
grid. If the map is cut to place the center along the Prime Meridian,
the result is a Eurocentric map useful for many purposes but not
the only way to view the world.
Miller World Map Centered Along 90th West Meridian . It projects an
American perspective on the world. Note how the three major countries of North
America, the United States, Canada, and Mexico, face both the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans, while in South America only Colombia has a two-ocean
perspective. Obviously, the two oceans have affected the history of North
America more than South America, where Chile and Peru are Pacific-oriented
countries while Brazil is an Atlantic-oriented nation. The Arctic circle is mostly
filled with land, with only a sea gap between Scandinavia and Iceland. Certainly
Norsemen and Vikings would note this feature. When viewing this map it is easy
to see that the location of South America is to the east of North America.
Insights
• World historians and geographers of the future should note the
relationship between climate and geography, since the relationship
has historical effects such as El Niño floods that destroyed ancient
Peru or the Little Ice Age (1450–1850 AD) that led to the decline of
the Viking colonies in the Atlantic.
•
Geographical properties, such as winds and currents, are also part of the
story that resulted in the transoceanic arena known as the Atlantic World of
colonial times. There are two traffic ways to the Americas, both made
possible by gigantic wind wheels known as the westerlies in the temperate
zones and the trade winds in the tropics.
– One pattern, followed mostly by the English, French, and Dutch, led to
the northerly America of foggy seas and punishing winters.
– The other, pursued by Spaniards and Portuguese (and eventually some
northern Europeans) reached the deceptively paradisaical America of
warm climates with, however, the dangers of diseases and storms.
– European America was, to use D. W. Meinig's words, the "geographical
emanation from these two earliest oceanic axes."
If one rearranges the map to show a Brazilian perspective, it becomes obvious that Brazil has no
frontage on the Pacific Ocean, is bordered in the west by the Andes, and is strictly an Atlantic Basin
country. The equator intersects Brazil at the Amazon and Africa between Nigeria and Angola, with Brazil
being closer in nautical miles to Europe and Africa than most of North America. With seventy percent of
Brazil's 172.8 million people clustered near the Atlantic coast, it is no wonder that it has been more
influenced by Europe (e.g., the national language is Portuguese) and Africa (a multiracial population in
which African influences dominate music and religion) than North America. Again, the bulk of African
slaves imported into the New World in the eighteenth century went to Brazil, a feature of the relative
closeness of the equatorial region of Brazil to a similar climatic zone in Angola and West Africa.
Seventeenth Century Atlantic
Basin. Lines indicate direction of
movement of goods from Europe
and Africa to the Americas and
from the Americas to Asia. Europe
was the source of financial and
commercial activity, while Africa
was primarily important for the
slave trade—so that the main
cultural impacts were those of
Europe upon Africa, and Africa
upon America. This was the
transoceanic arena in which an
Atlantic World emerged in the Age
of Empire, and the geographical
stage for cross-cultural
encounters, Spanish treasure
fleets, a transatlantic slave trade,
and the movement of European
peoples.
Adopted with permission from D.W. Meining, The
Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on
500 Years of History. Volume 1, Atlantic America,
1492–1800 (Yale University Press, 1986), p. 56
North America appears to be more involved in the Pacific Basin than South
America (its eastward location pulling it toward the Atlantic). Finally, this
map reveals a major truth about the earth, and that is that the earth is
mostly water not land, the Pacific Ocean amounting to 64,000,000 square
miles (over twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean).
Miller World Map Centered on 180 Meridian: The Pacific Perspective.
South is at top of map. After 1850, a Pacific perspective must be added. With
the United States acquiring Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii (and taking
possession of the Philippines), followed by Pearl Harbor and the Pacific theater
of World War II, the strategic importance of the Pacific for the United States
becomes obvious. With China emerging as a major power, the twenty-first
century may become the Pacific century.
Robinson Projection
• This projection was presented by Arthur H. Robinson in 1963, and is
also called the Orthophanic projection, which means right
appearing.
• Scale is true along the 38º parallels and is constant along any
parallel or between any pair of parallels equidistant from the
Equator. It is not free of distortion at any point, but distortion is very
low within about 45º of the center and along the Equator.
• This projection is not equal-area, conformal, or equidistant; however,
it is considered to look right for world maps, and hence is widely
used by Rand McNally, the National Geographic Society, and
others. This feature is achieved through the use of tabular
coordinates rather than mathematical formulae for the graticules.
The Peters Projection Map from
Two Perspectives: In 1974, as
an effort to reduce the political bias
of conventional maps, Arno Peters
created the 'Peters Projection' of
the world so that one square inch
anywhere on the map represents
an equal number of square miles
of the earth's surface.
Comparing Projections
"Political" Map
The Myth of Continents
•
•
•
The current sevenfold categorization of the earth into the continents (that is,
continuous, discrete masses of land) of Asia, Europe, Africa, North America,
South America, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), and Antarctica, is a
recent convention beginning with the threefold system of the Ancient
Greeks and modified over time into today's system. The problem with this
kind of classification is that most people consider "continents" to be "real"
geographical realities "discovered" through scientific inquiry, instead of what
they are—the product of creative imagination and metageography.
Continents not only supposedly reflect physical reality, but natural and
human features as well . In the field of geology, tectonic plates do not
respect the geographer's continental system, with Europe and Asia sharing
the same plate for more than thirty-five million years, and India being
tectonically linked, not to Asia, but to distant Australia!
While it is ridiculous to conceive of Europe as a continent and India a
subcontinent, the continental status of Europe (which shares a land mass
with Asia), serves to reassure Europeans that their sense of western
superiority and false dichotomies (Europe equals West; Asia equals East)
will go unchallenged.
The Myth of Continents
• The traditional notion of continents can be abandoned
(or at least modified). The idea of a North American
continent, separate from South America, encourages
false dichotomies that do not reflect actual biological,
geological, and cultural realities, and that overlooks
many themes that parallel the history of both regions
(from cowboy culture to urbanization).
• By substituting a world regionalism scheme for the
continental one, today's students will be using a regional
classification that better fits the realities of ethnicity,
culture, and history. This, then, would be the beginning
of an attempt to look at the New Old World in a new way.
Regional World Map
http://desip.igc.org/worldmap.html
Which map projection does the College Board use in their WHAP materials?