Maps and politics

Summary: Do maps accurately and objectively present the information we expect them to portray, or are they instead colored by the political purposes of their makers? In the lively and well-illustrated Maps and Politics, Jeremy Black investigates this dangerous territory, arguing persuasively that the supposed "objectivity" of the map-making and map-using process cannot be divorced from aspects of the politics of representation. Black uses a wide variety of historical and contemporary examples to show that maps have played, and continue to play, a major role in international and domestic politics. From an Australian atlas that gives Australia pride of place in the center of the globe to U.S. maps from World War II that minimize the distances between the United States and Europe, globalizing American attention, to current wildly divergent representations of the former Yugoslavia used by various groups to assert ethnic identities and territorial claims, maps both reflect and advance political agendas in powerful ways. Among the many topics Black considers are how to recognize the underlying messages shown by various projections in world maps or historical atlases; how cartographers deal with political and socioeconomic issues in maps; and the problems of mapping frontiers, especially those that are in dispute. In all these areas, Black shows that the major cartographic developments over the past century have been responses both to scientific advances and to a greater emphasis on graphic imagery in societies affected by politicization, democratization, and consumer and cultural shifts.