Mapping the World: a history of world maps from the Greeks to Google Earth

Throughout history, a range of different cultures have projected images of the world onto maps with a variety of socially and political important results. Before the age of photography and space exploration, which allowed hitherto impossibly accurate images of the earth, different communities produced world maps that fused political, scientific, artistic and imaginative impulses to create time-locked images of the earth at specific moments in history. This project examines twelve such historical world maps. It begins with the classical world of Ptolemy's Geography, and proceeds to provide in-depth studies of key examples of medieval mappaemundi; early Islamic maps; early modern European maps that utilise the new discoveries in printing, science and travel; eighteenth-century national surveys projecting new 'imagined' national communities; Utopian Korean maps, nineteenth and twentieth-century maps representing the impact of global European colonization. It concludes with online geospatial applications which are transforming the basic understanding of how cultures define, understand and use maps.
The field of mapping is currently undergoing radical historical and theoretical reassessment. This project is partly a response to and dialogue with current research contexts and debates about both the history and definition of cartography (see for instance the ongoing Chicago History of Cartography series). It argues for the need to broaden the conceptual and historical interpretation of world mapping through an interdisciplinary approach that provides a more flexible understanding of the definition of cartography. The twelve maps under analysis were created at particularly crucial historical moments, when their makers took significant decisions about how and what kind of geographical reality they wished to represent. The context for such an approach to world mapping emerges from present debates in the humanities and social sciences that regard globalisation as the defining socio-political dynamic of our time. This project aims to offer a history of such global imaginings, from their earliest manifestations to the most recent virtual, digital, online mapping techniques. Its objective is to explain how a range of maps of the whole earth created new visions of the world that convinced their audience of not just what the world looked like, but of why it existed, and of their own place within it. Each map encapsulates a particular idea or issue that defined how their makers understood the world, ranging from the classical definition of knowledge, to religion, cultural exchange, discovery, globalism, measurement, race, nationhood, utopia, economics, politics, and finally democracy. A final objective is to identify three central and enduring elements that appear to unify the maps under analysis: their transcendental claims to universal geographical representation; their applications as practical or spiritual guides to orientation; and their encyclopaedic claims to intellectual comprehensiveness. Ultimately, the project aims to explain the enduring desire of a range of cultures to map the world, and how the projected shape of the world has changed through time and across space.
The benefits and application of the project are threefold: firstly, to significantly develop the ongoing interdisciplinary study of the history of mapping across geography, history, literary studies and the history of ideas; secondly, to offer a discrete, global alternative to more established progressive and Eurocentric histories of cartography; thirdly, to provide a significant piece of knowledge transfer in producing a book that disseminates and effectively communicates academic research on the subject to a broad, informed general readership.