LAST week, on 4th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It is an attempt to correct the view of the world that comes from the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, the work of Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer. The problem with the Mercator Map is well known; for example, it shows the island of Greenland as the same size as the African continent, even though Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland! Simply put, Mercator maps greatly exaggerate the global north, the US and Europe, while shrinking Africa and most of Asia. Nor does it treat the rest of the Southern Hemisphere kindly. South America, nearly three times the size of Europe, looks comparable on a typical Mercator map.

Though there is no geographical reason the Southern Hemisphere should be smaller than the Northern Hemisphere, mapmakers made it significantly smaller because it had very little landmass beyond 40 degrees and was therefore cropped out. This meant that on most Mercator maps, because Western mapmakers cropped out much of the Southern Hemisphere, the equator was shifted significantly downward. The double whammy of squeezing the equatorial areas, where much of Africa lies, and shifting the equator down made the global north, particularly Europe and North America, seem much larger than it actually is. Typically, on most Mercator maps, the Northern Hemisphere looks twice the size of the Southern Hemisphere, though the two hemispheres are identical in size.

Mercator projections are just one of many projections. If you convert any 3-dimensional spherical surface into a 2-dimensional flat one to print and make copies, there are various ways to do it. But all of them will have distortions: if you maintain size, you distort shape; if you choose shape over size, you get Africa 14 times the size of Greenland looking the same. You can be true to either size or shape, or choose a solution that is in between as a compromise.

The blatant distortions of the Mercator projection and its Eurocentric approach have given rise to several alternatives, particularly from the broad left or progressive cartographers. Of course, others have opposed it, arguing that size does not matter and that they were comfortable being shown much bigger than they actually are.

The purpose of a Mercator map is that if we identify where we are on a Mercator map and the destination we want to reach, we can proceed in a straight line, as shown on the map. That is why ocean-going countries used Mercator projections for navigation when they had few instruments beyond the compass and the sextant to determine where they were relative to their destination. It is important to note that the direction shown on the map is not the shortest path between where you start from and your destination. The shortest path is the great circle on the surface of the globe from where you are to your destination. It is an arc of a circle. The straight line on a 2-dimensional map makes it appear to be the shortest distance, but it does not account for the Earth's curvature.

Simply put, the price we pay for converting a curved surface to a flat 2-dimensional one is that we distort the shape of the surface. We stretch certain areas and shrink others. On a flat earth, the shortest distance would be what your compass shows, but not on a sphere!

Earlier, ships used stars and the midday sun to estimate where they were and where they needed to go. Setting a course to your destination using a Mercator map and a compass was much easier than trying to guess where you were on an empty ocean with no landmarks, and constantly changing course for a shorter route. The constant line on the map was called the rhumb line, and following it greatly helped the ocean farers. Mercator maps were important and popular in Europe, particularly in Western Europe, because, apart from the Arabs, they were the major ocean-going nations. While the Arabs focused on trade, particularly in the Indian Ocean, Western Europeans focused not only on fishing but, in the off-season, on piracy: raiding and looting other nations. The Vikings, major romantic figures in Hollywood, were particularly brutal, combining looting with slave trading https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/little-known-role-slavery-viking-society-180975597/Of course, like all pirates, once you become powerful on the oceans, you can then convert it to conquest. The northern men, or Norsemen, conquered France and later England, and are known to us as Normans. Not very different from that of the Dutch and the British East India Companies, starting with trade and piracy, and later establishing colonial empires!

Not surprisingly, the ocean-going kingdoms of Western Europe, for whom war and fishing for food and hunting seals, walrus, etc., for blubber and skins were major sources of wealth, focused much more on seafaring and shipbuilding. This meant that ships built for the rougher Atlantic Ocean had certain advances that Arab and Indian ships did not, though the compass, the astrolabe, star maps, and various other nautical instruments came from Asia.

Since European ships were also built for war and not simply fishing, they were much sturdier, allowing them to mount cannons more effectively. Though Asian ships also mounted cannons, they mounted them only at the front and rear, not on the deck on both sides. Western European ships had deck-mounted cannons, which allowed them to fire “broadside,” meaning multiple cannons firing simultaneously, unlike the front- and rear-mounted cannons. That is one of the major reasons a handful of West European countries could use the oceans to first capture the ocean trade and later build their colonial empires. Unlike fixed forts, ships acted as floating ones, giving Europeans mobility in naval wars that static ground fortifications lacked.

As we know from Needham’s monumental work on Chinese science and technology in this period, many nautical advances in shipbuilding came from China. Seven voyages by Zheng He's ships in the 15th century (1405-1443), which travelled from China, Southeast Asia, India, and down the Arab coast to Africa, showed that the Chinese had built huge ships and a powerful navy. At that time, they were well ahead in both shipbuilding and warships. Internal differences between the landed aristocracy and the naval commanders led to the navy's destruction and a ban on building any oceangoing ships.

Although India supplied the timber necessary for shipbuilding to the Arabs and had a powerful navy earlier, it ceded the oceangoing trade to Arab merchants. Neither China, India, nor the Arabs saw the navy as militarily important. As one Mughal Emperor said, Oceans are for traders, not us, the warriors! Caste divisions in India also led, at one point, to barring upper castes from undertaking ocean voyages. Crossing Kala Pani, always forbidden by the Brahmins, was not strictly followed. India saw major maritime expansion in the Buddhist period, not by war but through trade and proselytising Buddhist monks. After the revival of Hinduism in the South, the taboo against upper-caste travel across oceans was gradually enforced more strictly, leaving the oceans to traders and mercenaries. For example, the major fleets of the Indian kings, whether the King of Calicut, also known as Samundrin or Zamorin, or Shivaji, relied on mercenary naval commanders and ships.

As we know from history, maps, ocean trade and wars are intimately connected. Ocean voyages and naval wars make maps strategically important. It is not simply where each country’s borders lie that is important, but also the strategic view of the world. We can see this currently playing out in Bab-el-Mandeb and the Persian Gulf. A quick look at a map would have convinced US leaders that Iran has a strategic advantage in the Strait of Hormuz, just as the Houthis do in the Red Sea and the passage to the Suez Canal. Neglecting the oceans is to repeat the mistakes of Asia in a different age, from which Asia has learnt. We need to bear this in mind today as well.