Selective vision

In 1904, the great Halford Mackinder, founder of the modern academic discipline of geography, published one of the most subversive maps of the century. It might seem unlikely that a scientific representation of the physical world projected according to mathematical principles onto a two-dimensional surface could mess with your head, but that is the unmistakable conclusion of Professor Jerry Brotton’s exhilarating book.

From Hereford cathedral’s Mappa Mundi, with its depictions of enigmatic griffins and bloodthirsty manticores and the Himannopods ‘who creep along rather than walk’, to Google Earth’s satellite view of the world showing it in such detail that the result rivals Jorge Luis Borges’s absurdist vision of a map as large as the earth itself, maps prove to be less conveyors of information than theatrical performances. Indeed the first really popular atlas put together in 1570 by Abraham Ortelius was named Theatrum orbis terrarum. And the influence of Mackinder’s map illustrates how mind-altering the plays can be.

What Mackinder did was to depict the world on either side of the central Asian steppes, locating the United States to the right, as an oriental power, and the vast southern oceans as a counterweight to the immensity of land above. Instead of the Anglo-American view that pictures history and power moving inexorably westward, he offered early 20th-century Europe the chance to imagine that a drive eastward might secure Russia and the landmass beyond, and its master would then have the new American power firmly in his sights.

Adopted three decades later by Rudolf Hess and the Nazis as ‘geography in the service of world-wide warfare’, the vision inflated Hitler’s nationalist greed for Lebensraum in eastern Europe to an immense prospect of global domination. Even today, world strategists, Putin presumably among them, see Russia as the pivotal power on the globe because it occupies what Henry Kissinger called, using Mackinder’s term, ‘the geopolitical heartland’.

Mackinder was only taking to an extreme what every map-maker must do— which is to select a method of representing reality, because it is impossible to reproduce exactly the three-dimensional sphericity of the earth on a flat page.