Jerry Brotton

On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 takes the famous "Blue Marble Shot" of Earth, with the South Pole at the top. But you wouldn't know it now because NASA inverted the image to align it with the public's expectations of what is "up" and what is "down." Being that Earth is a metal layered globe, the cardinal directions are relative. East and West are culturally flexible and true North changes by about 15 km every year. Linguistically, the directions are "deictic" meaning that they shift show more according to a person's point of view. The U.S. identifies itself on an East-West axis, but Canada is North-South. If you are Inuit, living above 68° N, the Pole Star is impractical and unreliable. For the ancient Egyptians, Upper was south, and Lower was north due to the Nile's flow. Scientifically speaking, "there is no reason why North should necessarily sit at the top." After all, the world's first compass, invented by the Chinese, pointed South. Beginning with the East and ending with the West, Brotton attempts to answer the question of the dominant North.

While I took plenty of notes from this one, I don't think Brotton is quite successful here. It's no secret that the North is dominant due to European influence. But one either needs a timeline of colonization to explain that OR have a book of global fun facts about the cardinal directions instead. Brotton tries to do both, and the crowded structure of the book leads to a lot of back and forth. What's more, although Brotton criticizes the West, it is still the dominant perspective throughout the book. The cultural nuances of Chinese, Islamic, and Indigenous cosmology are lost as Brotton jumps from one to the other as needed. I even had to fact check a few. But Brotton's passion for maps certainly comes through. Their descriptions of famous maps and types were excellent! The book certainly makes you think and readjust your perspective! show less

Maps serve two functions. They give you information—where people have been, places people have mapped, and the names given to those places. They also give you a destination, they let the heart roam over distant lands, and hope for an adventurous future. This information and hope have driven human history in more ways than we think. Beginning with a cuneiform clay tablet found in the site of the ancient city of Sippar in Babylonia, maps exist as an interesting window into how a civilization show more (or at least the mapmaker) views the world. In the 15th century, when the technology and means caught up to the desire to explore, the edges of the maps begin to be filled in and mankind got a truer picture of the world it inhabits. Jerry Brotton’s History of the World in Twelve Maps is a look at the world by investigating maps created at key points in history and what those maps say about the humans making them.

The twelve maps that Brotton uses range from Ptolemy’s map conceived around 150 CE up through the maps created by Google Earth. Each map encompasses a trait of the age. For instance, Gerard Mercator’s 1569 world map embodies the tolerance of Dutch explorers, the Cassini family’s 1793 map of France tells just as much about the nationalism at play as it does about the mapmaking of the day, and the Peters Projection of 1973 starts to incorporate the equality movement into cartography. There’s just as much history as there is geography in this book, and it’s a delightfully full book. Brotton’s inclusion of different projections, mapping methods, and illustrations is quite appreciated. Believe it or not, there are books on geography out there without maps, and they can be incredibly frustrating. Brotton’s research is pretty wide-ranging and inclusive, so you can easily move your way to other sources if you want to. All in all, this was a very good book with a ton of information. show less

I love the side-alleys of history—the relatively ignored, the peculiar, the losers, the things that could have been but didn't end up being, the stuff that's fascinating, but didn't move the world. My Classics/history grad school work was a parade of such topics. But there's a time and a place for such work, and a "Very Short Introduction" is not one of them. Rather, such books need to hit the dead center of the topic--the stuff that sets it apart, the stuff that matters. In another show more context, I'd love to hear Brotten talk about, say, Ottomans in the Renaissance. (I mean—I'm the guy who put Filelfo's poetic encomium to Mehmet the Conqueror on their Classics reading list!) But not in a Very Short History, where I expect to get a brilliant synthesis and theory. So… meh. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2731983.html

This is the sort of history of science that I very much approve of, taking twelve well-known historical maps and weaving around them the story of how cartography has changed in line with political needs and technological developments.

There are actually thirteen maps discussed in detail rather than twelve (though The Atlantic's review has a good overview of the twelve):
The oldest known map, a cuneiform tablet from Babylon
Ptolemy's show more Geography
Al-Idrīsī's Tabula Rogeriana
the Hereford Mappamundi
the Korean Kangnido
Martin Waldseemüller's map, the first to use the word "America"
Diogo Ribeiro's world map, which helped Spain to claim the moluccas
Mercator's world map
Blaeu's Atlas
the Cassini dynasty's mapping of France
Halford Mackinder's geopolitical thesis
the Peters Projection
and Google Earth.
It's arguable that this represents only a partial snapshot of the history of the world - geographically, most of these are from within the European/Middle Eastern space, and chronologically three are from the sixteenth century and another two from the centuries immediately before and after. But I think it's legitimate for a London-based Professor of Renaissance Studies to write about what he knows, while pointing out that there are also other times and places which the interested reader can go and find out more about.

Brotton is particularly good at unpicking the ideological choices made by mapmakers at all periods, explaining how the demands of the reader / viewer / customer / patron impact on what is actually shown, and chiseling away at any concept of a perfectly representative map. For those of us who were exposed to the sociology of knowledge at an impressionable age, it's a good bit of re-education. His deconstruction of the more distant cultures in time and space sets him up nicely for brutal dissections of Halford Mackinder and the Peters Projection, and also sets the scene for the last chapter's interrogation of Google Earth. What we see on the map is what the map-maker has chosen to show us - not what is actually there. show less