Category Archives: History

Africa, Culture, Education, Government, History, Politics, Society, United Nations

The Mercator map does not give a faithful representation

UNITED NATIONS: CORRECT THE MAP

Intro: In Mercator’s design, Earth’s curvature is accommodated by making the countries close to the Equator seem smaller than they are and those nearer the North Pole bigger

Down the generations, it has been a constant fixture on practically every classroom wall.

But the traditional world map may be about to get an entirely new look.

The potential change follows a United Nations vote in favour of substituting the map we were all introduced to in childhood with one that shows Africa occupying rather more space than it currently does.

It has sparked a wave of diplomatic disagreement over whether this is a genuine attempt to give a more accurate picture – or just the latest example of politically motivated wokery.

The roots of the row actually date back quite some way – as far back as 1569, in fact – to Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s original design aimed at helping European explorers to plot their way across the oceans. While Mercator’s blueprint proved to be an excellent navigational aid, it failed to fully reflect how the world looks.

Essentially, it is all down to the Earth being round. Put simply, the laws of geometry make it impossible to give a faithful representation of a globe on a two-dimensional chart.

In Mercator’s design, the planet’s curvature is accommodated by making the countries close to the Equator seem smaller than they are and those nearer the North Pole bigger.

The upshot is that the entire African continent is shown as being roughly the same size as Greenland – despite actually being around 14 times larger.

Nonetheless, the geometric quirks of the Mercator map were warmly embraced in Victorian Britain. With major territories such as Canada lying far to the north and highlighted in vibrant red or pink on the map, the result was to make the Empire look even more far-reaching than it was.

The positioning of Britain at the centre of the world – originally because of its seafaring dominance, but later also due to the establishment of the Greenwich Prime Meridian – added to the effect.

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The doubts about Mercator’s work surfaced in the late 19th century, as maps and atlases became more widely available. At the same time, people were becoming more knowledgeable about global geography and the relative size of individual land masses.

The beginnings of a backlash emerged in the 1970s as critics warned that both the development needs and economic potential of Third World nations were being underestimated as a result of the map – which was even described as an act of “cartographic colonialism”.

Fast forward to the early days of this century and the subject began featuring in mainstream television drama. In a 2001 episode of The West Wing – the NBC series based on the US presidency – a representative of the fictional Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality had a meeting with presidential press secretary CJ Cregg (played by Allison Janney). According to a West Wing fan site, the group “felt strongly that traditional Mercator maps gave undue focus on the nations and people of the northern hemisphere”.

Nor does the White House connection end there. Some observers say Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland, understood to be largely based on its strategic military location, is at least partly inspired by his belief that it’s a much bigger country than it actually is. 

By 2018, a group of cartographers had produced a new map called the Equal Earth projection – which has since been used by NASA. It was adopted in February this year by the 54 member states of the African Union on the grounds that it “more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa”.

According to the Correct The Map campaign – set up by African lobby groups in favour of the Equal Earth model – it would be possible to “fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare”.

Yet while the campaign warns that “we have based our understanding of Africa, and the world, on a map that is wrong” for more than four centuries, there is also a strong political undertone. “The Mercator map isn’t just about misrepresenting the size of the global south, it’s about power and perception,” it says.

According to one of the groups involved, from Africa No Filter, the campaign is part of a drive to stop the “world’s longest misinformation and disinformation” about Africa.

The group told the BBC: “Africa’s misrepresentation on world maps is not just a cartographic error, it’s a narrative issue.”

Kenyan geographer Kioko Muendo agrees: “Maps are more than just guides for travellers; they shape how regions are perceived politically and economically.”

At a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 4, member nations debated whether to adopt a Correct The Map resolution which described dropping the Mercator design as an act of “cognitive justice and memorial reparation”. Togo’s foreign minister Robert Dussey was one of the diplomats who argued for the change.

“A fair world begins with a fair map,” he said. “A map is never neutral. It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood.”

But US representative Yaryna Ferencevych was having none of it. In a damning volley of remarks, she told the hearing: “Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and ‘cognitive justice’”.

Describing it as part of “a much larger and more radical ideological project”, she said: “This resolution mocks the work and purpose of this institution.”

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Ms Ferencevych, a member of the US Senior Foreign Service, who has previously been posted to embassies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UK added: “Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote are like barnacles on our work here.”

Despite her reservations, the motion was carried by a wide margin, with the UK among the 164 member states voting in support, while six abstained and one – America – voted against.

In a statement published on its website after the result was declared, the UN said: “The resolution does not ban the Mercator projection or impose a replacement. Instead, it encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other so-called equal-area maps when relative size matters, and teach the limitations of any flat map in representing a spherical planet.”

It added: “Behind that seemingly technical debate lies a larger argument about history and power: whether a map designed for European sailors in the 16th century has, over generations, distorted not only geography but perceptions of a whole, vast and complex continent.”

None of this will convince anyone at the Trump White House, of course. The maps on the wall of the Oval Office are unlikely to be changed any time soon.

And President Trump will presumably continue to believe that Greenland covers far more terrain than it actually does.

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Arts, Books, China, Communism, Education, History, Society

Book Review: Mao

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The central argument of Brown’s thesis is that Mao was a ‘moderniser through destruction’. He believed that for a new China to be born, the old one had to be violently uprooted. The book suggests that while Mao’s methods were often catastrophic, the unified, assertive China we see today is an inescapable result of his reign

Kerry Brown writes that “Mao’s provocations… would have suited the world of social media and Twitter/X”. That’s a fertile observation. One could well imagine an @Mao account, or a podcast – The Chairman Mao Experience – attracting a huge and hungry following.

Mao Zedong was, after all, a famed dispenser of earthy aphorisms. He told an astonished hall in 1959: “Comrades… if you have to s—, s—! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.” He was obsessed not so much with state-building as with the more intimate endeavour of moulding minds. “Simple slogans, cartoons, and speeches”, he wrote, “have produced… a widespread and speedy effect among the peasants.” Social media would have been a central platform for his rhetoric.

Even in death, Mao trips us up. In the half a century since his passing in 1976, biographers and historians of China have failed to reach consensus on what drove him, what degree of responsibility he bears for the tragedies of the early People’s Republic, and what his contributions were to the wealthy and successful China of 2026. He ran the country for 27 years, yet remained an enigma – associated, at various times in his life, with violence and mercy, Confucianism, and techno-utopianism. In his new biography Mao, Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s College, London, all but emits a sigh, surveying the task ahead: “Getting a clear sight of who Mao was… presents a massive challenge.”

Some early signs provide pointers. Young Mao, born in imperial China in 1893, was fiercely opposed to the ruling “Simple slogans, cartoons, and speeches”; yet, he was schooled in the Confucian classics, and was impressed by the importance of self-cultivation. It was a short hop from self-cultivation to the cultivation of others’ selves – in particular those of the vast mass of China’s peasantry, whose loyalty and labour were required for revolution.

Mao came to believe that Marxism offered the best blueprint for achieving this. Russia’s Bolsheviks had shown that what Brown calls “an enlightened vanguard of activists” armed with a simple critique of present injustices could rally the masses to their cause. The people of Hunan province, where Mao built his early political base, possessed, in his estimation, “no brains, no ideals, and no basic plan”. Changing that required, in Brown’s words, “the framing of social relations in elemental terms as a struggle between… two great forces”. One only had to exchange Marxism’s “capitalists” with “landlords” for China’s peasants to raise their gaze beyond their own fields and throw themselves into collective action. Mao deployed night-schools and propaganda to this end, providing just enough education to create a biddable mass that would “rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power… [would] be able to hold it back”.

Compromise was not in Mao’s DNA. In 1921, while still a marginal figure in the party, he attended the fabled first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. The location, then in the city’s French concession, is today regarded in China as sacred ground, festooned (the author tells us) with TV screens and interactive guides. And yet: so disillusioned was Mao by the CCP’s pragmatic decision to forge a temporary alliance with the Chinese Nationalists that he boycotted its second congress in 1922. (In later years, he would pretend he’d done no such thing, and only failed to locate the address where the meeting was being held.)

Mao once declared that revolution is “not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery . . . a revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence where one class overthrows another”. Brown takes the reader on the wild ride that was Mao’s life in the 1930s and 1940s: his quick return to the fold, the rise of the CCP, its fight against Japanese invaders, then all-out civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists – whom Mao had driven out of China and into Taiwan by the end of 1949, thus establishing Communist rule.

Then comes the perplexing mix of success and tragic failure that were the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Greatest of all disasters was the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, during which a staggering 50 million people may have died (reliable statistics are impossible to come by). How to explain the gargantuan folly of setting up backyard steel furnaces in villages across the country, producing shoddy tools and utensils, while people were left eating tree bark and raw wheat?

Prof. Brown points us towards “Mao Zedong Thought”, the “philosophy” that seems to have turned on a terrifying sense of China’s population as an expendable means towards utopian ends. Those village furnaces might have claimed untold lives – consuming farmers’ tools and time when they should have been tending their fields – but for Mao they were a symbol of Chinese modernity. A nuclear exchange would be regrettable, but China had so many people that no enemy could possibly kill them all. Food aid was offered to China’s neighbours during the height of the famine, because you can’t put a price on projecting an air of progress. Brown wonders whether Mao understood economics at all – whether “capitalism” was, to him, little more than “a term of abuse or criticism for those he regarded as… enemies, rather than something [of which] he had a clear understanding”.

Brown is like a trustworthy tour guide, knowledgeable and clear, but not always sure which sights we most need to see. Digressions into the lives and thinking of other figures occasionally takes up space that might have been better used in rounding out our sense of the chairman himself. Writing about a figure like Mao isn’t easy; but readers may still find themselves hankering after a more vivid personal portrait, alongside answers to some of the questions thrown up by Mao and Maoism.

For instance, important aspects of Mao’s private life are passed over rather quickly. He was often consumed by what might now be described as anxiety and low mood, over fears of his rivals plotting and scheming against him. He withdrew from public life for long periods at a time before returning with fresh and deadly energy – most famously at the time of The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. And while we must be wary of sensationalism, it seems clear that Mao had a fondness for young women, especially during his later life. All these things might be mined for insights about one of the pivotal figures of the 20th century.

Similarly, we read about the extraordinary violence of the Cultural Revolution without being helped to understand what could make people do such things. So-called “sent-down-youth” from urban China were forced out into the countryside “to seek lived experiences of the revolution”. The results extended to forced marriage, rape, and even murder at the hands of rural Chinese who were fearful that their food and resources were under threat. Mao was the prime instigator and orchestrator of this infamous episode in Chinese history, alluding at the outset to the utopian potential of “disorder” under heaven.

Were Mao’s pathologies poisoning a nation, or coaxing to the surface its darkest inclinations? Brown is surely correct when he says that “it is hard to work out the psychology of a man who was almost constantly calculating and balancing different forces around him”. Still, a tighter curating of key moments and insights plus some judicious speculation might have helped the analysis in this book be more cohesive and compelling. As it is – and in fairness, perhaps this is true to the nature of the chairman – Mao Zedong risks once again slipping through our fingers.

– Mao by Kerry Brown is published by Reaktion, 272pp

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Arts, Britain, History, Politics, United States

The parallels with the 1760s

POLITICAL HISTORY

Intro: In the chaotic 1760s, as now, the country faced the entwined issues of debt and a geopolitical crisis

As America marks the 250th anniversary of their Declaration of Independence in 1776, we should hope they will remember the seven men who made it happen. I am not thinking of the Founding Fathers. No, I’m more reflective of the seven individuals or politicians who served as prime minister of Great Britain during the 1760s, the last of whom, the lachrymose Lord North, limped on until 1782 and oversaw events of the American War of Independence.

The 1760s are the last time that Britain had seven different prime ministers in a 10-year span, which is where we will be if the Labour Party dispenses with Sir Keir Starmer.

There are some important lessons from that time. In 1760, as students of history will recall, we (the Americans included) had a new King – George III, who came to the throne with the Earl of Bute, his former tutor, as very much the power behind the throne.

The prime minister of the day, the Duke of Newcastle, a veteran Whig statesman, had overseen the successful prosecution of the Seven Years War against France and Spain (resulting in British dominion over North America and much of India), but in 1762 he threw in the towel and his legacy was confined to the history books.

Lord Bute – who was also the King’s mother’s lover – then became prime minister. His tenure was an unmitigated disaster and was replaced in under a year by Lord Grenville, another Whig who lasted just two years but not before stoking up the North American colonies with his Stamp Act.

Grenville was replaced by the Marquess of Rockingham – best known now for commissioning Stubbs to paint his horse, Whistlejacket – in 1765. Rockingham’s administration expired with the Duke of Cumberland after just 13 months having attempted to conciliate the American colonies.

Pitt the Elder – “the Great Commoner” and the Churchill of his era – was the fifth PM of the decade. He held office for two years before resigning on grounds of health in 1768. By that time, though, his chancellor had passed the detested and draconian Townshend Acts, which included the imposition of taxes on imported glass, lead, and tea in America.

Running low on options, the King called on the Duke of Grafton and he lasted a year and 107 days before resigning in 1770 over France’s annexation of Corsica. Lord Noth came next.

George III bore some responsibility for this sustained imbroglio because of his inability to appoint someone who could command both his trust and the support of the Commons. But that’s only part of the story: underlying the crises was the burden of sky-high national debt, rising to a then lofty £144m.

It is to this we should pay special attention. Britain had emerged from the Seven Years War as the leading world power, with a vastly enlarged empire, particularly in America (having absorbed “New France”) that was expensive to maintain. Or, in other words, the trials of 250 years ago have some parallels with today: we’re also living with a massive national debt left over from the 2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 and confronting significant geopolitical challenges. Now, as then, it’s this combination of the two that is undermining the ability of the political class to rise to the challenges in hand.

Our level of debt stands at an extraordinary £111bn a year. If we could get that sorted – before it’s too late – we could, for instance, invest in more hard power and begin to claw back influence on global affairs again, rather than behaving like a geopolitical lobby group that no one takes any notice of.

As it was, the cackhanded efforts to balance the books and manage the enlarged empire in the 1760s and 1770s ended up driving a wedge between England and the formerly loyal American colonists. That led to another expensive war and the disastrous loss of what Churchill called the First British Empire.

Be grateful that in this case history cannot repeat itself.

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