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Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection
In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers an insightful, richly illustrated account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy. He takes us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. As Monmonier shows, mariners benefited most from Mercator's projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways—for wall maps, world atlases, and geopolitical propaganda.Because it distorts the proportionate size of countries, the Mercator map was criticized for inflating Europe and North America in a promotion of colonialism. In 1974, German historian Arno Peters proffered his own map, on which countries were ostensibly drawn in true proportion to one another. In the ensuing "map wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, these dueling projections vied for public support—with varying degrees of success.Widely acclaimed for his accessible, intelligent books on maps and mapping, Monmonier here examines the uses and limitations of one of cartography's most significant innovations. With informed skepticism, he offers insightful interpretations of why well-intentioned clerics and development advocates rallied around the Peters projection, which flagrantly distorted the shape of Third World nations; why journalists covering the controversy ignored alternative world maps and other key issues; and how a few postmodern writers defended the Peters worldview with a self-serving overstatement of the power of maps. Rhumb Lines and Map Wars is vintage historically rich, beautifully written, and fully engaged with the issues of our time.
- GenresCartographyHistory
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2004
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56 people want to read
About the author
Mark Monmonier
35 books23 followersMark Stephen Monmonier is an American author and a Distinguished Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.
He specializes in toponymy, geography, and geographic information systems. His popular written works show a combination of serious study and a sense of humor. His most famous work is How To Lie With Maps (1991), in which he challenges the common belief that maps inherently show an unbiased truth.
He specializes in toponymy, geography, and geographic information systems. His popular written works show a combination of serious study and a sense of humor. His most famous work is How To Lie With Maps (1991), in which he challenges the common belief that maps inherently show an unbiased truth.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 5, 2019
No matter what topic in science, math, or technology one chooses to investigate, however arcane, one can be convinced a priori of two things:
1) there are bitter divisions of opinion among the experts
2) there's a good xkcd webcomic about it (in this case, https://xkcd.com/977/)
Map projection is no exception in regards #1, either. The most public part of this, is the Mercator (if you don't know anything about map projections, this is the one you know) vs. Gall-Peters debate. This book is written, not by a pro-Mercator advocate, but rather by an anti-Peters advocate.
To compress a very long and detailed (and entertaining!) book into a few paragraphs: every 2D map is going to sacrifice something of accuracy (either in area, shape, distance, or some other thing) in order to get a 3D surface down to 2D. Several centuries ago, a fellow named Mercator did it in a particular way, in order to make a good map for European nautical navigators, so that they could easily use "rhumb lines" (don't ask) to find their way. Mercator's projection did (and still does) perfectly well for this, but it has the probably-not-entirely-coincidental affect of making northern Europe look a lot bigger than it should, relative to places like South America and Africa.
During the last half of the 20th century, a fellow named Peters developed a different projection (which it turns out had already been invented by a fellow named Gall 50+ years earlier), which showed each country in its appropriate relative size. This made it useless for nautical navigators, but then, Peters wasn't advocating its use for navigators. He was claiming that the Mercator projection, which hung on the wall in probably more than half of the classrooms in the world, was not a suitable map for the purpose of education, and it should be replaced with his.
The author of this book, while agreeing with the first part (Mercator is for nautical navigation, not education), objected to the second, claiming that there were many other much better projections available. Moreover, the claims by the Peters camp that Mercator and everyone who used his map since then were basically racists for doing so, was obviously galling (pun intended), since Mercator had perfectly valid technical reasons for making his map look the way it did, and the Gall-Peters projection would have been a disastrous choice for him to use for the task he was concerned with.
There is also the question of how influential map projections are over our worldview anyway, if the Mercator projection has not given us all an outsized view of the importance of Greenland in world affairs.
In between the first and last parts of the book, which are concerned more with the polemics of the topic, there are many chapters discussing the history, math, and technology of mapmaking, especially as concerns how to squash a 3D oblate spheroid onto a 2D surface. There are a lot of interesting stories, and the author covers them in an engaging way. For example, it was intriguing that in the early 40's, various Americans speculated in print that the Mercator projection had caused them to be isolationist, and disregard the threats from the east which eventually manifested as Pearl Harbor. This seems to be the cartographic equivalent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics (that what language we speak influences how and what we think); it gets re-invented every couple generations.
In general, though, the interesting stuff is not the polemics, its the various ways that humans have used, and continue to use, maps. I continue to find them intriguing, and not only for practical purposes. In fact, I'm starting to have ideas for a new kind of map projection system of my own...
1) there are bitter divisions of opinion among the experts
2) there's a good xkcd webcomic about it (in this case, https://xkcd.com/977/)
Map projection is no exception in regards #1, either. The most public part of this, is the Mercator (if you don't know anything about map projections, this is the one you know) vs. Gall-Peters debate. This book is written, not by a pro-Mercator advocate, but rather by an anti-Peters advocate.
To compress a very long and detailed (and entertaining!) book into a few paragraphs: every 2D map is going to sacrifice something of accuracy (either in area, shape, distance, or some other thing) in order to get a 3D surface down to 2D. Several centuries ago, a fellow named Mercator did it in a particular way, in order to make a good map for European nautical navigators, so that they could easily use "rhumb lines" (don't ask) to find their way. Mercator's projection did (and still does) perfectly well for this, but it has the probably-not-entirely-coincidental affect of making northern Europe look a lot bigger than it should, relative to places like South America and Africa.
During the last half of the 20th century, a fellow named Peters developed a different projection (which it turns out had already been invented by a fellow named Gall 50+ years earlier), which showed each country in its appropriate relative size. This made it useless for nautical navigators, but then, Peters wasn't advocating its use for navigators. He was claiming that the Mercator projection, which hung on the wall in probably more than half of the classrooms in the world, was not a suitable map for the purpose of education, and it should be replaced with his.
The author of this book, while agreeing with the first part (Mercator is for nautical navigation, not education), objected to the second, claiming that there were many other much better projections available. Moreover, the claims by the Peters camp that Mercator and everyone who used his map since then were basically racists for doing so, was obviously galling (pun intended), since Mercator had perfectly valid technical reasons for making his map look the way it did, and the Gall-Peters projection would have been a disastrous choice for him to use for the task he was concerned with.
There is also the question of how influential map projections are over our worldview anyway, if the Mercator projection has not given us all an outsized view of the importance of Greenland in world affairs.
In between the first and last parts of the book, which are concerned more with the polemics of the topic, there are many chapters discussing the history, math, and technology of mapmaking, especially as concerns how to squash a 3D oblate spheroid onto a 2D surface. There are a lot of interesting stories, and the author covers them in an engaging way. For example, it was intriguing that in the early 40's, various Americans speculated in print that the Mercator projection had caused them to be isolationist, and disregard the threats from the east which eventually manifested as Pearl Harbor. This seems to be the cartographic equivalent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics (that what language we speak influences how and what we think); it gets re-invented every couple generations.
In general, though, the interesting stuff is not the polemics, its the various ways that humans have used, and continue to use, maps. I continue to find them intriguing, and not only for practical purposes. In fact, I'm starting to have ideas for a new kind of map projection system of my own...
March 23, 2017
An interesting short history of the Mercator projection, as well as a brief critique of the Peters projection, which coincidentally was just selected as the official map projection for the Boston (?) public school system.
I've been reading a couple other Monmonier books (How to Lie with Maps, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame) and I appreciate his outspoken devotion to clear and concise writing. He doesn't try to be obtuse--he communicates his thoughts clearly, something that doesn't always happen, especially in academic writing. The author is obviously opinionated, but he states clearly why. I would recommend it for anyone interested in geographic history, or even anyone curious about why world maps look the way that they do.
I've been reading a couple other Monmonier books (How to Lie with Maps, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame) and I appreciate his outspoken devotion to clear and concise writing. He doesn't try to be obtuse--he communicates his thoughts clearly, something that doesn't always happen, especially in academic writing. The author is obviously opinionated, but he states clearly why. I would recommend it for anyone interested in geographic history, or even anyone curious about why world maps look the way that they do.
August 27, 2024
A very good history of the Mercator projection and its varying uses, and criticism of the Gall-Peters Projection. Also deals with other projections and cartographic history, but mostly focused on Mercator. Very good read, but would not recommend as first introduciton to projections, there are other books for that. This is better suited for a deeper dive.
December 23, 2020
The topic of the historical development of attempting to portray the round earth on a flat map is interesting, and the authors offer brief biographical descriptions of various of cartographers and mathematicians making such projections. Unfortunately, the book is oddly structured with various time periods and themes popping up all over the place. The main theme of the book is contained in a quote on p. 132: that any projection involves compromise.
June 28, 2015
Quite an interesting look at different map projections and the history of using the Mercator projection which was very functional for sailing charts and finding the bearing easily, but not so in this day and age.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews