Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Allen Lane, London, 2012, 544 pages. £ 30.00, hardback, ISBN: 9781846140990.

See Martin Dodge's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Codes of Life: Identification Codes and the Machine-Readable World

Maps don’t mirror the landscape. Instead, they actively transform territory in service to certain interests. Across over 500 pages Jerry Brotton explores this theme by focusing on twelve distinct "biographies" of world maps and their makers from a range of time periods. His overarching perspective is admirable yet at the same time challenging, as he aims at describing the complex enrollment of maps in terms of "the creative processes through which they tried to resolve the problems faced by their makers, from perception and abstraction to scale, perspective, orientation and projection" (page 13).

Through his twelve case studies Brotton convincingly exposes the "secret" of cartographic selectivity, and while this won’t be news to geographers and allied academics, it is still worthwhile to set out for general reader. Brotton shows how the subjective and deeply political nature of selectivity over what gets mapped goes a long way back into the history of cartography; for example he quotes from Ortelius’ famed 1570 Theatre of the World atlas:

"in some places, at our discretion, where we thought good, we have altered some things, some things we have put out, and other where, if it seemed to be necessary, we have put in" (page 10).

Brotton is an academic populariser, seeking to communicate to wider audiences. In this role he proved to be an enthusiastic and charismatic onscreen scholar, able to carry a major three part documentary series about maps (BBC 2010). While this book is scholarly in its themes, draws on academic literature, and has over thirty pages of endnote references, it has been clearly conceived as a cross-over title targeted to a smart science-orientated general readership, aided by the trade press approach of Allen Lane and the marketing might of its Penguin parent. It was out in time for the Christmas 2012 book charts and received wide and agreeable coverage in the mainstream media.

A History of the World in Twelve Maps displays an erudite and at times eloquent narrative style. As a storyteller Brotton is superior to most academic writers, but its sober and serious approach might be wearisome for people seeking a light read about pretty maps. It is also lacking in anecdotal wit and personal association, which can help the transmission of complex ideas to wider audiences (in relation to cartography this was done with aplomb by Mike Parker in his Map Addict book, 2009). It remains to been seen if Brotton’s thematic review of the history of cartography can really engage in the mode of other earlier spatially fixated "smash-hit" books like Simon Winchester’s (2001) volume on William Smith’s geology map or Dava Sobel’s (1995) Longitude.

For a book about maps, aimed at a crossover market, the illustrations can be a useful adjunct to the intellectual argument and a vital selling point. This volume has plenty—nearly forty figures and over fifty illustrations—, but these are often too small, with many crowded onto a couple of color plate sections. The result is that many images are divorced from the relevant point of discussion in the text (strangely there is no cross-referencing to point the reader to the right page for the color plate). The small format of the book also does no favors for the reproduction of some of these maps: they lack visual impact on the page and make it hard for the reader to imagine why they originally had such power to shape collective worldviews.

Certainly A History of the World in Twelve Maps does not have visual "wow" factor of a coffee-table book, but equally there is not much meat for an academic monograph. While there is plenty of informative description, there does not appear to be any really new empirical data from primary research. More importantly, there are no new theoretical arguments, just a restatement of well-known conceptual themes. The overarching argument is the view from above and the way in which "the powerful" sought to deploy maps to advance their case to control space and resources. There is nothing really about how mapping emerges through practice for different audiences, or how people were or were not using the map, or creating other mappings as means of resistance to hegemony. Mapping is more than controlling space. It is much more than power at play; indeed maps can be simply about play (cf. Dodge et al. 2009)! Brotton’s book is in many respects a conventional critical deconstruction of different maps, yet arguably the leading edge of academic discourse around the cartographic as "post-representational," looking beyond the power of the image to say something about practices that bring mapping into being (e.g. della Dora, 2009; Kitchin and Dodge, 2007).

Why twelve maps?

"These twelve maps were created at particularly crucial moments, when their makers took bold decisions about how and what to represent. In the process they created new visions of the world that aimed not only to explain to their audiences that this was what the world looked like, but to convince them of why it existed, and to show them their own place within it" (page 13). But has Brotton chosen the right topics for his visionary tales? And why twelve maps? Is this too many? The classic psychological adage is that the optimal number items for people to consider is seven, plus or minus two (Miller, 1956).

More fundamentally there seems to be no real intellectual logic for his selection of these particular twelve maps. As a set they are not comprehensive, nor representative across history or geography. Five out of Brotton’s twelve selected maps are from the narrow one-hundred-and-fifty-odd-year "age of discovery" and rise of European nations to world powers. None were selected from the nineteenth century and only three were selected from the twentieth century. There is nothing on thematic mapping or statistical display that underpinned the rise of industrial capitalism or governmentality by central state bureaucracies. The older map exemplars are harder to bring alive because less is known about their makers and the artefacts themselves seem alien to our spatial conventions.

Brotton seems much more comfortable talking about the familiar cartographic "canons" of the Renaissance, rehearsing the significance of Blaeu, Mercator and Waldseemüller’s maps. This is unsurprising as this period is Brotton’s forte—he is currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at QMUL and he wrote in detail about these mapmakers in his 1997 book Trading Territories.

For anyone who knows something of the history of cartography and the changing conception of world space, then his selection forms a pretty conventional set of steppingstones along a well-known path: from Ptolemy’s first global grid to Peters’ re-projection of the Earth for supposedly egalitarian ends, with its undue foci on the Renaissance European master mapmakers. Many scholars of cartography—and map geeks—will find the selected exemplars quite hackneyed by over-familiarity, and too often associated with "glorious" tropes of the upward sweep of (largely western) map history. Why not challenge these conventions and go for some oddities or cartographic artifacts that counter accepted narratives that mapping is all about "discovery," "empire" and "money?" Here maps are all about science and survey knowledge; they are too serious to leave any space for fun or frivolities.

The selection of Peters’ projection as the focus of the second to last chapter in the book is a peculiar choice in some respects—this map matters to cartographers but does it really illustrate a fundamentally shifting world view in the post-war period? Why not views of Earth from space taken by the American astronauts at the height of the Cold War? The last case study chosen by Brotton is Google’s global vision in 2012 and this seems like a tokenistic nod to contemporary mood. But then why not consider MapQuest, the real internet pioneer from the mid 1990s, or perhaps the impact of TomTom’s first mass-market satnav device launched in 2004?

The temporal ordering of chapters—from Ptolemy’s projection to Google’s global vision—is a logical way to proceed but does not help engage the reader. Why not start with maps people use today? The selection and structure of this book are problematic because they heavily imply a narrative of continuous technical progress from a crude past to a sophisticated present, although in the introduction Brotton is at pains to say he is not falling into this trap:

"each map is as comprehensible and as logical to their users as the other, be it the medieval Hereford mappa mundi or Google’s geospatial applications. The story told here is therefore a discontinuous one, marked by breaks and sudden shifts, rather than the relentless accumulation of increasingly accurate geographical data" (page 14).

Info-mapping

Somewhat more original is Brotton’s focus on the significance of technological developments in mapmaking and external drivers from the wider scientific milieu. This is welcome and well handled. For me the most interesting chapter was the last one, focused around the emergence of Google Earth from technical obscurity into popular culture. In many ways this truly enchanting piece of spatial software offers a highly original world view. Even after repeated use it still has the capacity to engender a giddy feeling in me as I swoop through gigabytes of GI streaming seamlessly from some distant server onto my screen. The thrilling ease of use of this software system belies a bloody past and a possibly greedy future. Google Earth has much baggage from its militaristic antecedence, and while it appears to be a free good, open to all, its goal is about (re)constructing a political economy of cartographic information that will drive profits into the coffers of a new class of mapmakers (Zook and Graham, 2007).

As you look upon GE’s beautiful digital globe, one should also remember that it is starring right back at you—Google’s compelling mapping services are in many ways the apogee of covert corporate surveillance of customers’ activities. The "do no evil" ethos espoused by coders of Google comes out  a Californian techno-centric ‘frontier’ vision of the world, one that should be made "free" for liberal capitalism by engineering "solutions" that come essentially without social responsibilities. Technology is subtly sold as a means for improvement. Indeed, Brotton, at times, almost seems to fall for this ideology of ethics-free access:

"It seems that anywhere on the earth can potentially now be seen and mapped by anyone online, without the inevitable subjective bias and prejudice of the cartographer" (page 407).

Elsewhere Brotton is more critical. However, he makes a real stretch when he tries to summarize in a single chapter fifty plus years of developments in digital computation, information theory and the emergence of GIS-based mapping. Here he tends to make connections with historical hindsight that probably did not exist for the people at the time. While he underplays the significance of the military and Cold War imperatives (and he recounts the common myth that the internet was built to survive a nuclear attack), Brotton concluding sentiment is well spotted: "the history of maps has never previously known the possibility of a monopoly of valuable geographical information falling into the hands of one company" (page 433).

Whether such a mapping monopoly will be realised remains unclear. It is interesting to speculate whether the last few years represent the high-point for "free" online availability of worldwide mapping, driven by fierce competition for audience share and the willingness of Google and a few other large internet corporations to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on spatial data and overhead imagery. As academic geographers we have been naïve about the significance Google’s power not just in mapping but in shaping virtual geographies, which are coming to determine the access, allocation and the particular meanings we attach to places. Time is ripe for a more critical mapping of Google’s worldview.

In conclusion this book is a curious hybrid. It tries to be a scholastically populist volume but it rather fails as it has too much detail for many lay readers. One could contrast Brotton’s solid and somewhat pedestrian approach to Simon Garfield’s "pop-science" effort. The two books came out almost simultaneously and cover similar ground. However, Garfield’s book On the Map (2012) is written in more bite-sized chunks and bullet points of insights, all wrapped in a bright cartoon cover map. Overall, The History of the World in Twelve Maps is a worthy book on cartography, but one that falls awkwardly between two stools—too much descriptive width for some and not enough intellectual depth for others. 

References

BBC (2010) Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession. A three-part BBC4 television documentary.

Brotton J (1997) Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World. London: Reaktion.

della Dora V (2009) Performative atlases: Memory, Materiality and (Co)authorship. Cartographica 44(4): 241-56

Dodge M, Kitchin R and Perkins C (2009) Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. London: Routledge.

Garfield S (2012) On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way It Does. London: Profile Books.

Kitchin R and Dodge M (2007) Rethinking maps. Progress in Human Geography 31(3): 331-44.

Miller GA (1956) The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2): 81-97.

Parker M (2009) Map Addict. London: Collin.

Zook MA and Graham M (2007) The creative reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. Geoforum 38(6): 1322-43.