World maps and the dawn of globalisation

Introduction

From a distance of 11,000 kilometres above its surface, the planet earth sits in the black void of the cosmos. It appears free of clouds and water, although its ocean floors still sparkle ultramarine blue, the continents a beguiling patchwork of greens, browns and pinks.

North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia curve round in a crescent through the right-hand half of the globe. The Atlantic Ocean dominates the bottom left, giving way to the tip of North America, with the brilliant white sheet of Greenland nearly crowning the planet’s apex, looming over the North Pole.

This is a version of the world as Plato imagined it nearly two and a half thousand years ago in the Phaedo, a gleaming, perfect sphere, ‘marvelous for its beauty’. It is the ecumene that Ptolemy projected on his geometrical grid in the second century AD, the globe that Mercator plotted onto a rectangle fifteen hundred years ago, and the earth that NASA finally captured in the first extra-terrestrial photograph of the whole planet taken the 1970s. This is the geographer’s ultimate object of study, a graphic image of the earth (or at least that part of it turned towards the viewer).

In his article, 'World maps and the dawn of globalisation', Professor Jerry Brotton considers the role of digital mapping and its links with globalisation.

Download the full article below.