Arno Peters and his Map Work
/updated 2 February 2024, to correct a silly error pointed out by a colleague (thanks Bernie) and to refine/clarify some of the prose!
I’ve been struggling for months now on how to deal with Arno Peters and his world map. Every time I turn to the subject, I just get bogged down by the complexity of the scattered and multifaceted literature, by the insanity of much of Peters’ map work, and by the different responses to his work. There is also the matter of just how significant the “Peters phenomenon” (Loxton 1985) has actually been for subsequent map scholarship, especially as his projection has fallen largely from use and his specific arguments have proven tendentious, to say the least. Add to this the fact that the debates were thirty to fifty years ago, so that there is absolutely no guarantee that map students today will be aware of their broad context let alone their details, and then the further fact that as I look at earlier scholars and commentators, Peters’ arguments were really not that original. Nor were the responses. So why the drama?
After at least three tries to say something new, and floundering each time, I am presenting this blog entry simply as an attempt to organize the information about Peters in a way that makes sense to me, which is to say historically. Think of it as a long bibliographical essay based on what I have to hand (so still not comprehensive, especially in the German-language literature). I’m not sure that it says anything necessarily new or significant. So please join me as I go through a series of cuts at Peters and his map work.
1. Arno Peters (1916–2002)
2. The Quest for Historical and Geographical Equity
3. An Equitable World Map
4. Peters’ Three Rhetorical Strategies
5. Essentialist Responses to Peters’ Map Work
6. Four Responses to the Idea that Maps Can Be Political
7. Reflections
1. Arno Peters (1916–2002)
I’m not going to presume to give a full biography of Peters; for that see Fischer (1996) and Kuchenbuch (2021). The salient points are that he was born and raised in Berlin within a family of communists aligned with Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacus group (Müller 2010, 719). He remained a socialist all his life. In 1945, he completed a doctorate in art history and journalism at the University of Berlin, with a dissertation on the propagandistic functions of film (Kuchenbuch 2021, 110–20). The dissertation’s title, “Der Film als Mittel der öffentlichen Führung,” translates as “film as the means of public guidance” or more colloquially as “film as propaganda” (Müller 2010, 727n11). After the war Peters spent most of his life in Bremen.
2. The Quest for Historical and Geographical Equity
World War II had completely recast the global political and economic system. The old European empires imploded; their colonies steadily reincarnated after 1945 as independent states. Global politics were reconfigured as the Cold War between the capitalist West and the communist East, further complicated by the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement. Nonetheless, the industrial North still dominated the global economy and continued to exploit the apparently decolonizing South. In this era of profound geopolitical change, and personally caught within a now divided homeland, Peters set out to challenge the entrenched Eurocentrism of the dominant global culture, that of the North.
Peters began by creating, with his first wife Anneliese, a large synoptic table of history that gave equal weight to all parts of history in all parts of the world. Preparation and publication was funded by the US High Commission for Occupied Germany. There were fifty spreads, each measuring 32 × 50 cm, each covering one century and together presenting the five millennia from 3000 BCE to the present; each spread identified events and developments in all parts of the globe (Peters and Peters 1952). The work soon came under fire in Die Neue Zeitung, a daily newspaper issued by the US occupying forces, for the “bright red thread” that seemed to run throughout and for its failure to place the proper emphasis on the major historical events of conventional historiography. The New York Times reported the response of the High Commission, which admitted that
The tendentious editing is recognizable not only by statements along pro-Communist lines but also by the omission of important names and facts and the assignment of much space to subject items which do not deserve them under an objective basis.
For example, the article continued,
United States authorities declared Herr Peters “injected communism in every field of world history.”
As early as 446 B.C. there was condemnation of private ownership and the democratic state, Herr Peters wrote. As early as 136 B.C. there was a “rising of slaves and proletarians,” he said. He gave the establishment of a town in Siberia twice as much space as Columbus’ discovery of America. (New York Times [15 November 1952], 4, emphasis added)
And so on. West German newspapers followed suit, for example calling the synoptic timeline a “Bolshevik ‘cuckoo’s egg.’” The debate quickly transformed into a larger discussion of the appropriateness of (self)censorship in a democratic society and of the proper treatment by the media of communism. At the same time, Peters’ work was rebuffed by the authorities in East Germany as being insufficiently Marxist (Monmonier 1995, 26; Kuchenbuch 2011, 835–37). [n1] The criticism only confirmed for Peters the correctness of his argument, that existing historical narratives might claim “an objective basis” but were nonetheless thoroughly politically determined. Peters’ socially and culturally equitable timeline was indeed greatly needed.
In the mid-1960s, Peters set out to complement the synoptic timeline with an historical atlas that would be as constant and as equitable in its spatial coverage as the timeline was in its chronological structure and coverage (Peters 1976, 9; Peters 1979, 9; Peters 1983, 146; see Kuchenbuch 2011, 837; Kuchenbuch 2021, 435–55). In the process, he later recalled, he had found European atlases and geographical texts to be plagued by the same Eurocentric (“europa-zentrisch”) biases that infected European history books:
Existing atlases are generally Eurocentric. Small countries such as Switzerland (41,000 km2) that are privileged to lie in central Europe are represented on their own double-page spreads. Yet non-European countries that are ten-times larger, such as [the former German colony of] Cameroon (475,000 km2), must be searched for on large general maps (of Africa or North Africa); and even a 200-times larger country, like Brazil (8,512,000 km2), is represented not on its own double-page spread but on a general map of South America together with a dozen other states, or it is fragmented across several partial maps of South America.
In the process, non-European states are drawn at considerably smaller scales and their individuality is obscured. Moreover, this double defect is usually not appreciated by the user. The states of central Europe therefore appear as self-aware subjects of an individualized view of the world, the other states of the world as unknowing objects of a generalized geography.…
This geographical world view is suitable for perpetuating the self-esteem of the White man, especially the European, and for keeping colored people aware of their powerlessness. (Peters 1976, 5; Peters, 1979, 5; see also Peters 1982, 18) [n2]
Such disproportionality afflicted historical atlases too. Peters argued that they focused almost exclusively on European history. Other parts of the world were depicted only as the field of European expansion—both in the ancient world and in the post-1420 era of global empire—and never as the sites of the origins of human civilization (Peters 1976, 5).
3. An Equitable World Map
According to the published versions of Peters’ 1974 lecture before the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie (German cartographic society), his exploration of regular and historical atlases had also made him aware of a structural flaw in European, and particularly German, world maps. Specifically, Western world maps were implicitly inequitable because they gave the earth’s continents and countries markedly different visual weights, exaggerating the size of the industrial and imperial countries and centralizing Europe while diminishing the colonized tropics. The key offenders were the seemingly ubiquitous world maps on the projection introduced by Gerardus Mercator for his large wall map of 1569, a projection renowned for its excessive enlargement of regions away from the equator and toward the poles. The same rhetorical emphasis on Europe was also evident, Peters asserted, in all the other world map projections that geographers had introduced to counter the gross distortions of Mercator’s projection. He dismissed them all as “Mercator-type” or “Pseudo Mercator” projections, without ever actually defining either category. Thus, Western world maps allied with atlases and geographical texts to shape the public’s mind so that their utterly distorted depictions were taken by their Western readers to be “the actual, undistorted picture of the world.” What was needed, Peters concluded, was an equal-area map projection that would “overcome” the “Eurocentric character of our geographical world view,” [n3] that would provide a true-to-scale representation of space directly akin to his synoptic timeline’s “true-to-scale spatial representation of time,” [n4] and that would form the basis of atlases that did not downplay certain parts of the world even as they overemphasized other parts (Peters 1976, 9 and 5; also Peters 1982; see Müller 2010, 2015; Kuchenbuch 2011).
Peters therefore sought to create a new world map projection that gave equal weight to the areas of continents and countries and would accordingly promote an equitable global image that might then serve as the foundation for atlases of world history. He described this equal-area projection to the Hungarian academy of sciences in 1967 and he published his first world map five years later (Peters 1972). He subsequently promoted his projection and his vision for a socially equitable cartography in three ways. First, he gave press conferences and public lectures, including the 1974 talk to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie. Second, he published pamphlets (Peters 1976, 1979, 1982) and a book, Die Neue Kartographie/The New Cartography (Peters 1983). Third, he designed and published atlases that used only his projection (Peters 1985; Peters 1990).
Peters’ world map projection came to widespread public attention when it was used for the map on the cover of the alarming report, North-South: A Programme for Survival by the Independent Commission on International Development (1980). The commission had been convened by both the United Nations and World Bank and chaired by the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt; the study is therefore also known as the “Brandt Report.” Translations of the report similarly featured Peters’ world map on their covers, as also on the cover of the 1983 follow-up report (Kuchenbuch 2021, 504; Independent Commission on International Development 1983).
The cover of North-South (1980). Two-color lithograph, 17.5 × 11 cm. Author’s collection.
The report assessed the current state of the world, firmly rooted in the legacies of modern imperialism, and predicted a dire economic, demographic, and environmental future for the globe. It made sense to emblematize the alarming report with a map whose difference to more familiar world maps made it revolutionary (Pearce 2002) and disturbing (Vujakovic 1989, 101–2). Equipped with a stark line distinguishing the exploitative global North from the exploited global South, Peters’ equal-area projection emphasized the physical disparity between the countries that have gained and those that have lost and demonstrated the geographical dimension of global inequity. Peters’ projection offered a powerfully different image of the world that appealed to organizations concerned with building global equity. Oxfam, UNESCO, UNICEF, and church groups soon distributed many millions of impressions of the “Peters Map” to promote their causes (Ramphal 1985; Crampton 1994, 22; also Peters 1985, 2–3; Kuchenbuch 2021, 19–20n5). There is good evidence that in adopting the Peters projection, members of these organizations were motivated more by Peters’ political claims for the projection than by any understanding of cartographic principles (Vujakovic 1989).
Today, Peters’ complaints appear uncontroversial and quite appropriate to many people, and indeed use of his map projection has declined alongside its shock value. The proliferation of digital mapping packages has offered easy access to the seemingly impenetrable mathematics of map projections. Just as graphic user interfaces offer computer users hundreds of typefaces that they might deploy at will, so mapping programs offer a wide array of projections in easy-to-use packages (see Baker 1986). Writers have all become font-freaks and the geographically minded have all become projection-nerds (Munroe 2011). Peters’ projection has thus been displaced by more aesthetically pleasing equal-area and compromise projections. Today, an Internet search for maps showing the North-South divide or the “Brandt Line” throws up world maps on a number of projections, of which only a very few are Peters’ and one or two are even Mercator’s!
Having said this, however, Peters’ map projection seems to be the map projection that automatically comes to mind whenever members of the public want to point to the politically determined character of world maps. It’s the one projection that everyone knows is overtly political in a positive way. Thus, its appearance in the famous scene from The West Wing with the “Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality” (Sorkin and Redford 2001; see Vujakovic 2002; Sriskandarajah 2003), and again in 2017 when Boston Public Schools announced a plan to place maps on Peters’ projection in classrooms throughout the city (Mahnken 2017; Walters 2017).
4. Peters’ Three Rhetorical Strategies
Peters used three rhetorical stratagems to persuade non-specialist audiences that his world map projection was not only better than any other map projection, but that his projection was in fact the only one that generated a proper and correct image of the world.
The first strategy was to pair world maps on Mercator’s projection that highlighted two regions with some basic figures for the areas of those regions to demonstrate unequivocally that Mercator’s projection was inherently distorting in a Eurocentric manner. For example, the lower element in the figure below appeared in several works, each time accompanied by the incontrovertible statement that Mercator’s projection made Europe look twice the size of South America, although at 9.7 million km2 Europe is actually covers barely more than half of South America’s 17.8 million km2 (Peters 1976, 4; 1979, 4; 1983, 62; also Kaiser 1987, 12; Sorkin and Redford 2001). In Die Neue Kartographie, Peters separately offered similar maps on his own projection to demonstrate that it is equal-area in nature and therefore depicts regions in their correct relative sizes (upper element in the figure below); he further drew straight lines across world maps on many projections, but not his own, to show how similar distances are distorted (Peters 1983, 106, 87–89). These comparisons were all carefully selected to lead readers to the obvious conclusion: Mercator’s projection was inequitable; Peters’ own projection was not.
Arno Peters’ comparison of the depiction of Europe and South America on his own (equal-area) world map projection (upper) and on Mercator’s projection (lower), indicating how the latter exaggerated the size of Europe and diminished South America. Monmonier (1995, 17) reproduced the figure and some of its surrounding text (also Strebe 2015, fig. 743). Lithograph, 8 × 5.5 cm (neatline). From “A New View of the World,” a press release issued by Peters and published in Christianity Today 28 (17 February 1984): 39–40, esp. 39.]
Peters’ second rhetorical ploy was argument by verbosity. Peters piled up a great heap of nonsense about the technical aspects of map projections and their analysis. He invented several properties by which to assess the appropriateness of world map projections, and only his projection met all of these criteria. These supposed principles included “fidelity of position” (straight meridians between north at top and south below), “fidelity of axis” (meridians and parallels intersecting at right angles), “fidelity of scale” (not linear map scale as “scale” is usually understood, but the ratio of areas on the map to areas on the earth), and so on (Peters 1976, 11–17; Peters 1979, 11–17; Peters 1983, 105–29; repeated by Kaiser 1987). These criteria all have the air of specialized jargon, even as they refer to simple and intuitive concepts that can be understood by the non-specialist (as Sorkin and Redford 2001). The criteria are, however, thoroughly specious and have nothing to do with the mathematical properties of map projections with which map scholars actually work (Robinson 1985; Snyder 1988; Porter and Voxland 1986).
I have noticed one change in Peters’ characterization of map projections that demonstrates that his arguments were indeed utterly specious. (Frankly, no one has been interested in carefully explicating Peters’ arguments, because why bother? They’re all wrong!) Initially, Peters acknowledged that map projections can possess one of two primary properties that are mutually incompatible: conformality or equivalence. Conformal (or eumorphic) projections are those that preserve angles and shapes; they include Mercator’s, the stereographic azimuthal, Gall Stereographic, and many other projections. Equivalent (or equal-area) projections are those that preserve relative sizes of areas; they include the Mollweide, Gall Orthographic, Peters’ and many other projections. The technical issue is that a map projection can possess one or other property, or neither, but not both. Map makers must choose which kind of projection to use, and Peters argued that previously they had always chosen wrongly (Peters 1976, 7; Peters 1979, 5). But in Die neue Kartographie, Peters thoroughly garbled the idea of conformality in order to assert that the property is actually impossible to achieve. He called the idea of conformality “myth number 1” of “the old cartography”; Mercator’s projection thus had no redeeming features at all (Peters 1983, 67–103, esp. 68–73, 75). The change plainly demonstrates Peters’ willingness to advance fraudulent arguments to promote his work to the general public.
Finally, Peters’ third rhetorical strategy was a thoroughly partial and distorted narrative of the history of world mapping. He used this to explain why Europeans adopted Mercator’s 1569 world map projection because of its adverse enlargement of the North and further to position his own projection as the culmination of cartographic history and as the foundation for “the new cartography.” In other words, Peters presented his map projection as the only map projection that was in any way correct (Vujakovic 2003a, 62–63). The historical narrative was effective, like all the best propaganda, because it drew selectively on well-established narrative structures for the history of cartography and so appeared to make sense to non-specialist audiences. It was easy for Peters to argue that Mercator’s projection had dominated the preparation of world maps during the West’s long rise to, and exercise of, global power because the standard developmental model of the history of cartography already peaked with Mercator’s supposed unification of geographical and marine mapping through his projection. Moreover, Peters drew on (1) the art-to-science narrative for the history of cartography that had become especially popular after World War II, (2) the general post-war sense of the emergence of a newly technologically enhanced cartography, and (3) the existing and widespread discontent with the geographical distortions inherent to Mercator’s projection. These narrative structures and enhancements combined to present his own projection as the next great step in the triumphal history of the science of cartography.
Willem Jansz. Blaeu, Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula (Amsterdam, 1640). Peters (1983, 58) reproduced a 1648 variant of this map to illustrate how “the Mercator projection had, half a century after the death of its creator, been finally established.” Note that Blaeu had originally published this map in 1606 (Shirley 2001, 258). Hand-colored copper engraving, 40 × 54 cm on paper 54 × 63 cm. Courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine (Osher Collection); online at oshermaps.org/map/414.0001.
That is, Peters argued, Mercator had in 1569 made a crucial advance in map making that served as a fundamental tool of Europe’s early modern maritime empires; it then took “half a century after the death of its creator” for Mercator’s projection to be “finally established” as the world map for Europe’s imperial expansion, a triumph that Peters supported with a single data point in the form of one seventeenth-century world map (above). Thereafter use of the projection proliferated during the zenith of nineteenth-century European imperialism. Indeed, so successful was the Mercator-image of the world that even when geographers adopted other projections for their world maps, they persisted in making “Mercator-type” and “Pseudo Mercator” maps that were equally Eurocentric in their worldview. Now, however, the age of maritime empire was past and the world was entering a new geopolitical age in which the former colonies would come into their own; a new world map, and indeed a “new cartography,” was needed (Peters 1976, 7–9; Peters 1979, 7–9; Peters 1983, 9–61).
The novelty of Peters’ argument lay less in its underlying principles, such as they were, than in his assertion that only his projection was capable of meeting the new geopolitical task. Ultimately, Peters rejected all previous world maps because the claims that they were truthful images of the world were simply a sham based on unexamined political positions. Instead, Peters (1983, 150) held that his own “revolutionary” maps were in fact “objective” and correct, precisely because they actively and openly embraced a political truth and sought to defeat the hidden “ideologies which hitherto have stamped all world maps.” Peters’ world map was honest because it was politically self-aware; it was truthful because only it met all the conditions supposedly needed for a world map projection.
5. Essentialist Responses to Peters’ Map Work
No matter Peters’ claim to occupy the moral high ground, to academic cartographers he was simply a charlatan. He willfully misrepresented a highly technical and precise discipline to the general public. He slandered academic cartographers as having willingly perpetuated a Eurocentric and imperialistic world view. He had plagiarized the work of a previous geographer (James Gall) and had passed it off as his own, or at least had not done his due diligence in ensuring that no one else had previously developed the projection and had failed to give appropriate credit. And Peters had committed the cardinal sin of using rhetorical strategies in a manner that was contrary to the scientific effort to extirpate personal bias.
In their various responses, critics presented Peters and his work as a coherent and consistent phenomenon. They did so because they pragmatically declined to counter each and every travesty within Peters’ work; that way lay if not madness then at least bloated essays that would be much, much longer than Peters’ own essays. Critics therefore reduced Peters’ arguments to an essential core to which they might respond efficiently and effectively. Their criticisms were of course shaped by existing academic and professional concerns (Crampton 1994), but their structure was determined by the rhetorical need to counter each of Peters’ three rhetorical stratagems.
First, with the exception of Ingrid Kretschmer’s (1978b, 128–33) review of Peters’ rhetorically powerful comparisons, critics simply ignored Peters’ many demonstrations of areal distortions by Mercator’s projection. They did so for the simple reason that such distortions are inevitable in any map projection. Yes, Mercator’s projection distorts, but that fact is already well known, and geographers and cartographers had advanced many alternative world map projections in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Snyder 1993, passim; Oswalt 2015).
Second, exasperated academic cartographers repeatedly decried the contemptuous and fraudulent manner in which Peters had dismissed a century’s worth of technical analysis of map projections only to produce ugly, awkward maps. Just like evolutionary biologists faced with having to counter the “Gish gallop” of supposed facts piled up by creationists, academic cartographers recognized the rhetorical futility and tedium of addressing each and every element of Peters’ wearying litany of false and partial arguments. They instead cut to the chase by restating the basic principles of map projections and by assessing Peters’ maps and atlases as works of cartographic design (e.g., Maling 1974a; Kretschmer 1978b; Robinson 1985, 1987; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie 1985; Porter and Voxland 1986; King and Vujakovic 1989). They also advocated for the educated selection of the proper projection for particular map-design tasks (Robinson 1986, 1988, 1991; all reprinted in Lapaine and Usery 2017, 1–115).
More specifically, they recommended the abandonment of all rectangular world projections (Snyder 1989; Robinson 1990) and for the adoption of minimum-error or compromise projections that present the world to good overall effect. German and US academic cartographers first singled out Oswald Winkel’s Tripel projection of 1921 (Heupel and Schoppmeyer 1979) [n5] and then also the projection that Arthur Robinson had designed for Rand McNally in 1961–63 (Robinson 1974, esp. 147n4; also Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie 1985; Anonymous 1985, esp. 109). The pattern would be repeated: when Boston Public Schools decided in 2017 to adopt Peters’ projection for wall maps in some classrooms (Mahnken 2017; Walters 2017), a team of academic cartographers responded by promoting their “equal earth projection” as a more aesthetic alternative (Šavrič et al. 2019; see Abee 2021, 153).
Third, critics dismissed Peters’ historiography as being “replete with broad generalizations and dubious assertions” and as being a distraction from the main matter of map projection theory (Robinson 1985, 103). As such, they failed to engage with it (excepting Vujakovic 2003a, 62–63 [see above]). Rather than rehearsing all the evidence for Peters’ historical ineptness, critics have sought to undermine Peters’ arguments by denying his straw man. No straw man, no rhetorical power.
This third response has taken four directions (a–d):
(a) Mercator’s projection had never been as dominant in world mapping after 1569 as Peters claimed (Monmonier 1995, 14–16; Monmonier 2004; cf. Siegel and Weigel 2015).
(b) Similarly, many geographers and others had already criticized the application of Mercator’s projection to world maps and had already developed many other world map projections.
(c) Mercator’s projection is in fact properly used when applied to the mapping of particular regions for the purposes of navigation and (in its transverse aspect) territorial mapping (Kretschmer 1978a; Monmonier 1995, 19–20; 2004). The Boston Public Schools kerfuffle prompted several online commentators to rehearse the argument that there is nothing inherently bad about the projection except for its “misapplication” to world maps (Cairo 2019; Britton 2021; McDermott 2021). But note, however, that in depicting Mercator’s projection as having been the projection for all marine charts and world maps since the late sixteenth-century, and in supposing that the projection proved “revolutionary” when it was created, such commentaries simply rehearse the inanities and falsities of the established map history that Peters had intensified (also Edwards 2015).
(d) What Peters claimed as his own invention had already been described in 1855 by the minor Scottish geographer James Gall (Crampton 1994, esp. 18–22), which in turn was a special instance of a family of equal-area map projections on a cylindrical developable surface first explained almost a century before Gall (esp. Maling 1974a, 1974b; Kretschmer 1978b; Loxton 1985; Robinson 1985, 1987; Porter and Voxland 1986; Snyder 1988; see Spicer 1989; Crampton 1994, esp. 19–20; Monmonier 1995, 9–44, esp. 11–14; Monmonier 2004, 149–51; Crampton 2010, 92–94; Brotton 2012, 378–404; Müller 2012).
This entire body of criticism has been reduced to the simple formula of calling the projection the “Gall-Peters projection.” These three words proclaim Peters’ inadequacies both as a map maker and as an historian without having to address the political implications of Peters’ arguments (Monmonier 1995, 12–13; Crampton 2003, 29–31; see Edney 2005, 3–4).
Not that consideration of those political implications has led to a careful and detailed examination of Peters’ arguments. If anything, such consideration has further simplified and essentialized Peters’ position by reducing it to the straightforward proposition that maps are ineluctably political in nature. Sociocultural map scholars have reconfigured Peters’ precise arguments about modern world maps and their fostering of geopolitical mindsets into the general principle that all maps are ineluctably biased (e.g., Harley 1988, 290, 308–9n74). Sociocultural scholars took the ball offered by Peters and ran with it: if “maps are never simply objective, scientific, mathematically precise, [and] utterly reliable statements of ‘truth,’” then “they are constructs, they carry a point of view, [and] they have an agenda”; that agenda, whether “political or cultural or ideological or commercial or practical,” becomes the focus of sociocultural study (Kaiser and Wood 2003, 54; also Kaiser and Wood 2001).
Finally, a number of political scientists have recently considered Peters’ role in contemporary politics, portraying his work as a particular product of the Cold War (Müller 2010, 2012, 2015; Kuchenbuch 2011, 2021; Barney 2014). And they were correct to do so, given that by the 1960s, many within the rapidly expanding discipline of history were calling for historiographical equity. This trend would lead in the 1980s to the establishment of new disciplinary institutions for world history, women’s history, environmental history, subaltern history, indigenous peoples’ histories, and so on (Bentley 2002, 2011). In mapping terms, the rise of the politically equitable study of world history was marked by Geoffrey Barraclough’s Times Atlas of World History (1978), which self-consciously adopted a radical aesthetic in mapping the past with an avowedly anti-Eurocentric ethos, introduced by its own attempt at a spatially and chronologically equitable timeline of human history. Barraclough’s bright, unstable aesthetic was distasteful to contemporary academic cartographers (esp., Robinson 1980), but it inspired Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal’s politically radical and highly influential State of the World Atlas (1981).
Yet political historians have again treated Peters’ work as a consistent whole. David Kuchenbuch (2011, 835) understood Peters’ synoptic timeline of global history as having “anticipated” the world map by its “claims to objectivity, imaging processes and moral parity,” even though the nature of the historiographical debate sparked by the timeline was about political censorship rather than the technicalities of doing history. [n6] The ready equivalency drawn by Peters and his critics between the structures of his synoptic timeline and his world map rehearses the Ciceronic dictum that chronology and geography are the “two eyes” of history (Edney 2019b). The political scientists have again collapsed Peters’ arguments into a singular spatio-temporal, historico-geographical project.
6. Four Responses to the Idea that Maps Can Be Political
From the sociocultural vantage point, the Peters phenomenon has served as a “defining moment” for academic cartographers, as they were forced to choose between constructions of “the map” as scientific or as political and, as a result, between denying and pursuing politicized interpretations of maps and mapping (Crampton 1994; see also Vujakovic 2003b; esp. Kaiser and Wood 2003). Yet it is more appropriate to identify four kinds of response by sets of scholars with different intellecual backgrounds and agendas. Each set either rejected the other sets or looked to them as presumptive allies, thereby creating the binary, us/them, accept/reject structure of the critique.
Rejecting all Possibility of the Political
Geographers and other scholars whose work centered on analytical cartography and the emergent technologies of GIS did not respond directly to Peters’ arguments, but came later to reject a priori the proposition that maps can be political in nature. Construing maps to be solely and strictly normative aggregations of metrical data and map projections as geometrical transformations, these scholars cannot conceive that maps could ever be political. In January 1991, for example, a listserv discussion about Peters’ arguments for geographical equity prompted the geographer Duane Marble to exclaim,
A map projection is a mathematical transformation from three dimensional spherical coordinates (world) to two dimensional Cartesian coordinates (maps). It escapes me how politics, etc. can enter into it. (Quoted by Harley 1991a, 12–13; Harley 1991b, 3) [n7]
Similarly, daan Strebe (2012, 33) thought that the academic cartographers who did engage with Peters should never have argued “over the [respective] merits of specific map projections” and should have instead simply denied “that any projection has the power to do what Peters claimed” (see also Strebe 2015; Krämer 2023, 9–10). A few academic cartographers followed suit in the same vein, notably Michael Wood (1994, 22) who reasserted the objectivity and neutrality of professional cartography:
cartographers are just facilitators and the responsibility for the more serious distortions/misinterpretations identified by the deconstructionists must, in the end, be blamed on human frailty and misjudgment largely beyond the cartographer's domain.
These normatively purist scholars (“us”) have been thoroughly dismissive of the three other sets of responders to Peters (“them”).
Acknowledging yet Rejecting the Political
It was perhaps unfair for Strebe (2012) to complain that academic cartographers had failed to uphold the normative map concept by ignoring the political. Before their field’s wholesale realignment in the later 1980s, in which they embraced digital mapping and geovisualization, academic cartographers had treated maps as works of human abstraction that could potentially be turned to political ends. Academic cartographers had thus adhered to a two-part agenda: first, discipline the map maker to avoid the corruption of politics; second, design maps to limit the capacity of map readers to interpret them in ways other than the maker intended. Peters’ claim that he was objective because he admitted to his political bias flew in the face of the first agenda item and deeply insulted academic cartographers. How could they not respond?
Since the high point of the Peters’ phenomenon, academic cartographers have continued to hold that social and cultural factors have no bearing on the core disciplinary matter of map design other than as corruptors of geographical truth. Alan MacEachren (1995, 10) could state, without further explanation or justification, that “the postmodern assessment of cartography” might have “generated a lively debate” but “it does not—and by design cannot—provide answers to fundamental questions about how we should select symbolization and design strategies” (see also Board 1991, 136; Keates 1996, 191–203). Again, Michael Wood (1994, 22) reasserted the objectivity and neutrality of professional cartography: “cartographers are just facilitators and the responsibility for the more serious distortions/misinterpretations identified by the deconstructionists must, in the end, be blamed on human frailty and misjudgment largely beyond the cartographer's domain.” In rejecting the political nature of maps and map making, these and other “theory avoiders” (Crampton 2003, 29–31) have found commonality with those who espouse the normativity of the metrical map (the communal “us”) and have rejected the work of those other scholars who embrace maps as political things (“them”) (see Edney 2005, 3–4).
Acknowledging that Maps Are Politically Subjective
Building on the arguments that were very pronounced during World War II, that the general conditions of map making mean that no map can be truly objective, some newcomers to map studies argued that all maps are made by humans and must in some way be subjective. The political scientist Alan Henrikson (1999, 110) opined, for example, that “objectivity is…an impossible ideal. Not even the globe, which permits us to see the world in the ‘round’ but not all at once in its entirety, is a perfect map.” These scholars tempered their appreciation, however, by the individualistic preconception of the ideal of cartography: institutional and commercial circumstances might affect map design and map use, yet their effect is limited only to the occasions when individuals make and use maps (Edney 2019a, 64–74). Rejecting the concept of discourse and insisting on communication as an act between individuals and therefore subject to all human frailties, these map scholars set aside Peters’ position that Eurocentrism pervades geographical discourse, as expressed in a wide variety of texts and maps, and cast the matter of influence and effect as an individual response to specific map images (e.g., re Peters, Black 1997, 33–40; Klinghoffer 2006, 120–23).
In other words, as J. K. Wright (1942) had stated, “map makers are human.” While for Wright this dictum inspired the need to discipline map makers to hold fast to the truth, it’s become a touchstone for the necessarily subjective nature of maps. Thus, the recognition of the distortions of Mercator’s projection is a by-product of the map maker’s selection of a map projection: map design “necessitates trade-offs, since no projection can preserve all angles, distances, and areas” (Schlögel 2016, 73). Thus, Mark Monmonier’s highly popular and effective guide to good map design, How to Lie with Maps (1991; 3rd ed., 2018), is often mispresented and cited as an exploration of the subjectivity and ideology of maps (e.g., Schlögel 2016, esp. 72–73; Morel 2021).
Overall, this individualistically humanist position suits academics who are self-consciously practical, who are politically moderate, and who eschew ideology. These pragmatically liberal map scholars persist in the goal of fostering cartographic science and so generally lean towards and associate with those critics who insist that maps are properly scientific and who adhere to either normative or disciplined map making (together, the communal “us”). Conversely, they variously deride those map scholars (in the final set) who adopt a discursive rather than individualistic approach to the issue of the political effect of maps (“them”). To the individualists, the final group of map scholars appear as “Marxists,” “postmodernists,” and “deconstructionists” whose overtly politicized works are still too ideologically biased to be able to contribute to the actual task of map design and production (e.g., Monmonier 2013, 172; also Monmonier 2016).
Embracing the Discursively Political Nature of Maps
Finally, there are those scholars who were primed to embrace Peters’ arguments by the increasing integration of radical politics and theory into the humanities and social sciences. This fourth response has been expressed in several ways, mostly by younger cohorts among academic cartographers and by scholars hailing from beyond academic cartography. There has been the direct promotion of Peters’ arguments (esp. Kaiser 1987; Kaiser and Wood 2001). But few have taken on board Peters’ actual arguments about map projections and map history. Rather, what struck an intellectual chord was the evident principle of the political nature of maps.
Accepting the political nature of maps and map making, academic cartographers and geographers have turned to what they called critical cartography and GIS to explore the social and cultural biases and inequities that are baked into modern mapping data, technologies, and practices (Crampton and Krygier 2006; Crampton 2010). More broadly, scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have come to look at maps as possessing multiple forms and functions (literary and performative as well as graphic); as expressions of personal, communal, and national identities; as tools of surveillance and control; and, overall, as inherently human works that are as redolent of human desires and fixations as any work of art, literature, or politics. Most broadly, reaching out into the realm of public opinion, there are those who accept and perpetuate Peters’ arguments for the imperialistic essence of world maps on Mercator’s projection; it is not that “all maps lie,” but that “all maps are propaganda.”
From all these standpoints, maps are intimately interwoven with the societies and cultures that gave rise to them. Scholars in this fourth set effectively hold that the political and human in maps is discursively constructed. Mapping entails the exercise of broad social and cultural processes and is not a strictly individualistic concern. Adherents to the position (“us”) that maps are by default political tend to be dismissive of the three other sets of map scholars (“them”).
7. Reflections
I’ve ended up dividing the topic of the Peters’ phenomenon into these sections because I saw how reactions to Peters were shaped by existing intellectual agendas and, because those agendas are limited and constrained, I convinced myself that those agendas had missed something important about the issues at hand, that something had fallen into the cracks between them. As I read and re-read the literature and Peters’ own writings, it seemed as if there was something of a three-way tug of war between the treatment of maps as (1) discursive objects, (2) works of individual creativity and comprehension, and (3) as exceptionalist texts for representing space and spatial relationships. Peters’ own comments about the weight of politicized imagery in atlases and histories seemed to talk to (1), but he developed and justified his own map in terms of (2) and (3). Critics, with the exception of the fourth set, also reacted in terms of (2) and (3). That fourth set rejected Peters’ precise arguments but accepted the discursive principle (1) that all maps are necessarily political in nature. There accordingly seemed to be something new to say about Peters and his map, but I struggled to identify it.
In the end, I must admit, I have come to realize that I was guilty of imposing a Foucauldian idea of discourse onto Peters. Peters’ writing about history and geography and persuasion was, I now conclude, very much in line with the individualist preconception of the ideal of cartography (i.e., 2). I’ve come to that conclusion after a detour through behavioral psychology and the idea of the “cognitive map.” In a revamped chapter 6 in The Map: Concepts and Histories, I can now use the Peters phenomenon as a detailed example of how persuasive and propagandistic maps were understood and studied in the post-war era. And I can leave Foucauldian discourse to chapter 9. Once again, it takes time to appreciate how our established concepts shape, help, and hinder understanding.
Notes
n1. Monmonier left it open whether Peters had been self-serving or outright misleading in his claims of rejection by the DDR authorities, Kuchenbuch (2011, 837n56) gave the archival documentation attesting to the validity of Peters’ claims.
n2. “Die vorliegenden Atlanten sind insgesamt europa-zentrisch: Kleine Länder wie die Schweiz (41 000 qkm) werden auf einer eigenen Doppelseite dargestellt, wenn sie den Vorzug haben, in Mitteleuropa zu liegen. Zehnmal größere außer-europäische Länder wie Kamerun (475 000 qkm) muß man auf einer großen Übersichtskarte (Afrika oder Nordafrika) suchen; und selbst ein 200mal größeres Land wie Brasilien (8 512 000 qkm) ist nicht auf einer eigenen Doppelseite dargestellt, sondern auf einer Übersichtskarte von Südamerika zusammen mit einem Dutzend anderer Staaten, oder es ist auf mehrere Teil-Übersichten von Südamerika verstreut. | Die außereuropäischen Staaten sind dabei in wesentlich kleinerem Maßstab gezeichnet, auch kommen sie in ihrer Individualität nicht zur Anschauung. Dieser doppelte Mangel wird vom Benutzer zudem meist nicht realisiert. Dadurch erscheinen die Staaten Mitteleuropas als selbständige Subjekte einer individualisierenden Erdbetrachtung, die anderen Staaten der Erde aber als bloße Objekte einer generalisierenden Geographie. | …Dieses geographische Weltbild ist geeignet, die Selbstüberschätzung des weißen Mannes, besonders des Europäers, zu verewigen und die farbigen Völker im Bewußtsein ihrer Ohnmacht zu halten.”
n3. “Es war für mich klar, daß nur eine flächentreue Erdkarte dafür in Betracht kam, denn ich wollte ja den europazentrischen Charakter unseres geographischen Weltbildes nicht abmildern, sondern überwinden.” See Peters (1979, 9).
n4. “…eine maßstabgetreue räumliche Darstellung der Zeit…” See Peters (1979, 5).
n5. Buchholz (1980) offered a counter argument, against the Winkel and for Peters.
n6. “…die gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Anneliese verfasste Synchronoptische Weltgeschichte ein Buch, in dem der Zusammenhang von Objektivitätsbehauptung, bildgebenden Verfahren und Paritätsmoral, wie ihn die Peterskarte herstellte, vorweggenommen ist.”
n7. I thank Jeremy Crampton for both reminding me of Harley’s use of this quotation and for sending me a copy, from Harley’s archive in the British Library, of a printout of the entire thread that David Woodward had sent him (11 February 1991). I previously remembered the discussion as being part of Crampton’s own INGRAFX listserv (Edney 2019a, 133), but it was instead the GEOGRAPH listserv on the finhutc.hut.fi server.
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