Where do our world maps actually come from? When was the first one made? Are our maps racist? And why did the UN just pass a resolution encouraging governments and organisations to move away from the map we’ve all been using since the 16th Century?
In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we look at the one thing every traveller we’ve featured on this podcast has needed – and some have even shaped: a map of the world.
Our story starts in Roman Alexandria, where Claudius Ptolemy’s grid of latitude and longitude laid the foundations of modern geography, and continues with Gerardus Mercator, whose 1569 world map transformed navigation at sea – then shaped how the world saw itself for the next 450 years.
The catch? Maps have always meant power, and many things we take for granted – that north is up, that Europe sits at the centre, that Africa is roughly the size of Greenland – are choices and distortions, not facts.
And it's no surprise that African nations led the recent push at the United Nations to move away from Mercator: few places have paid a higher price for the way Europe drew the world. We ask how the blank spaces on European maps of Africa came to be seen as an open invitation to colonialism, and how the Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference turned lines on paper into borders that still divide communities today.
We also delve into Renaissance heresy trials, horoscope-obsessed Greeks, and the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. You’ll also hear about David Livingstone’s hunt for the source of the Nile, the Gall-Peters map controversy (yes, including that West Wing scene), and why the only map that doesn’t lie, is a globe.
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