HIST 2212 Final Core Maps

Name: Peters World Map Maker: Oxford Cartographers - Projection was created by James Gall and Arno Peters Date: ca. 2017 Significance: The Peters World Map—alternatively known as the Gall-Peters Projection—is a map lauded by its supporters such as the Oxford Cartographers as a "new map" for "a new age" but ridiculed by its detractors as an "illogical... erroneous" work for which "only the cartographically naïve will ... fail to be exasperated by [its] pretentious and misleading claims;" however, as Brotton argues, the Gall-Peters Projection is not significant for the controversy it created, but rather for what its controversy revealed: "all maps of the world are inevitably selective, partial representations of the territory they claim to represent." Although it was originally formed by James Gall—a nineteenth-century scientist, mathematician, and religious thinker who readily admitted the projection's limitations—the Gall-Peters Projection was largely overlooked until Arno Peters provocatively introduced it at a May 1973 press conference; having spent his life in the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and an arbitrarily, Cold War split West Germany, historian Arno Peters—in a similar manner to Judith Schalanksy, author of the Atlas of Remote Islands—had developed a keen sense of how cartography could be manipulated "to further... ideological agenda[s]" such as colonialism and geopolitical domination and thereby "divide nations and people"—as evidenced by maps such as John Smith's New England, Mackinder's "Geographical Pivot of History," or Nazi propaganda maps during World War II. And to Peters, the centuries-old Mercator Projection—one of the most common world maps—was "primarily responsible" for the "arrogance... xenophobia" and Eurocentrism that acquisitively, destructively, and inequitably charted the course of recent world history; although Peters' criticism was unduly harsh—as Mercator's Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio was designed to augment navigation and sought to transcend the sixteenth-century's religious strife through an apolitical, dispassionate, and Neo-Stoic image of the world—he did have a point. The Mercator Projection, which was subject to substantial polar distortion, made the land-dense Northern Hemisphere loom over the Global South, with Greenland inaccurately seeming larger than South America and North America incorrectly outsizing Africa; accordingly, in an attempt to underscore "the narrowness of our European-oriented view of the world and the realization of its incongruity with the broad, all-embracing manner of the world and life in our epoch"—an epoch characterized by decolonization and the geographic questions of "land distribution... and economic inequality" between the world's industrialized nations and the "developing" "Third World"—Peters instead championed an equal-area projection, one that—by preserving the relative size of its countries and continents—provided a powerful message in support of global equality. Indeed, Peters claimed that he had created a perfect world map; on a scale of ten criteria—which selectively supported his projection at the expense of others—his map scored a ten out of ten. This claim to objectivity and accuracy—a claim that had been cast on other projections to support separate politically and socially contrived images of the world—drew the wrath of the cartographic community, which knew that it was mathematically impossible to transcribe a three-dimensional sphere onto a two-dimensional map; after all, to create equal area, the Gall-Peters Projection sacrificed conformality and resorted to substantial distortion. By fixing standard parallels at 45° North and South, vertically stretching the regions between these parallels, and horizontally stretching the polar regions, Peters may have preserved the true size of the Global South, but in doing so, he made Africa, South America, and Southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia appear much taller than they actually are. This meant that European and North American temperate nations—which were closer to the standard parallels—were depicted more accurately than the equatorial and tropical nations that the map fiercely claimed to support; furthermore, some of the map's supporters—despite recognizing that the Gall-Peters Projection took a step toward establishing the Global South's geopolitical place—claimed that the Peters World Map did not substantively depict—and thereby did not do as much as Peters claimed in addressing—the world's developmental, equity-based problems. Therefore, despite being an admirable attempt to promote global equality, the Peters World Map is significant for emphasizing—as future map historians J.B. Harley and Max Edelson would contend—that "all maps were partial and ideological representations of the space they purported to depict." In addition to capturing a recent historical development in which the Western, postcolonial world and its scholars have attempted to come to grips with, redress the excesses of, and promote equity in response to an imperialist past—as illustrated by the map's widespread circulation, use in Boston Public Schools, and mobilization by developmental NGOs—the Gall-Peters Projection is a "defining moment in the history of mapmaking." It helped the scholarly community grasp that all maps—regardless of their claims to cartographic rigor—are subjective; in turn, the Peters World Map helped revolutionize the cartographic field of study—even impacting our approach to this course.

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