Windows on the World Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession

I'm going left to my favourite coffee shop,

which does the best coffee on the street.

Then I come straight back out and I'll call into the paper shop,

because my friend KC runs it and we always have a joke.

I come out, go left, curve down here, big new-build place here.

I'm intrigued about what it's going to do to house prices,

so I'm always looking to see how that's going on.

Then I keep left, cross a bridge, which goes over the canal.

Then I'm going right along here, passing all the boats, and then

I'm going right here. Go left,

and there I am, I'm now into Oxford station.

I'm there in ten minutes and then I'm on my way.

Map making is a basic human instinct.

It's one of the ways we make sense of the world around us.

I've been studying and writing about maps for most of my working life.

I'm fascinated by the way they're like windows on to different times

and different cultures.

That map that I've produced is absolutely unique to me.

It's totally subjective.

I'm not interested in what's going on over here.

I haven't filled any of this area here. It's dead to me.

I've edited out what I don't want.

I'm doing what mapmakers tend to do.

They offer a specific perspective from their

own subjective experience, and the map reflects that.

In this series, I'm going to explore how maps give an insight

into the political and cultural forces that drive society.

Wow!

I'm going to dig beneath the surface of some extraordinary maps

to reveal stories of power,

plunder,

and possession.

In this programme, I'm going back to where map-making began.

I'll find out what first drove people to create maps

before they could even write.

How they evolved, not just to depict the world,

but also to exert power and authority over it.

I'll discover some of the great scientific advances

that made this possible.

And I'll explore how the style of modern maps that we take for granted

as objective, even natural, is nothing of the sort.

Valcamonica in Northern Italy.

Home to one of the oldest settlements in Europe.

For a map fanatic like me,

it's most famous for being the cradle of map making.

The map created here

is considered to be one of the oldest maps in the world.

This is cartography's year zero

and it gives us some vital clues as to why people

were compelled to make maps before they even learnt to write.

The map is located high in the Eastern Alps,

near the small village of Bedolina.

It has survived for nearly 3,000 years

and was only identified by archaeologists 80 years ago.

So here it is. It's extraordinary.

And as I look at it, what's interesting is that there's

clearly a structure, there's a code,

there's a system about what's being represented here.

You can see these rectangles with dots in them represent fields.

And throughout, these lines,

which appear to represent some notion of the landscape.

There's timber-framed houses down here.

There's the roof and the main body of the house there.

There are stick figures, these warriors down here,

you can see a deer with four clearly marked legs.

And for me, it's actually incredibly moving

because this is where it all began.

This is the beginning of map making.

This is the origin of what I've been thinking about for all this time.

It's absolutely breathtaking.

The origins and purpose of the Bedolina Map

have mystified archaeologists for years.

This is not a geographically accurate map of the area.

You couldn't use it to get from A to B.

So what was it for?

After analyzing rock drawings and using comparative dating techniques,

archaeologists now believe it was

created by an ancient tribe, the Cammuni,

at a critical moment in their history.

3,000 years ago, the Cammuni were pioneering a whole new way of life.

Agriculture was replacing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle

and creating a more complex social structure.

Archaeologist Alberto Marretta

thinks this is the key to unlocking the map's secrets.

We have evidence from the rock art and from the archaeology that

in Valcaominica there were aristocracies here.

Some sort of small groups of people controlling the small communities

and probably controlling the land.

And do you think that's important in terms of how they used the map?

I think that this group of people, this aristrocracies,

are symbolizing through the map the possession of the landscape

that they had in this part of the valley.

It seems that the tribal elites

were using the map to celebrate their ownership of the land.

They draw the map probably to represent not a real landscape,

but to represent an ideal landscape.

It was some sort of...

supernatural representation of the landscape

as it should be after you and after your sons

and after your time has passed on.

-So it's a very symbolic image.

-Yeah.

In some sense it is highly symbolic.

'Alberto believes these images of well-ordered fields

'and plentiful crops were a vision of future prosperity.

'The map was designed to bolster the power of the ruling elite

'by reassuring the Cammuni people

'that life would improve under their leadership.

'The map is a fascinating window into an ancient culture.

'And it reveals that map-making was bound up with power and politics

'right from the start.'

As ancient societies became more complex, so too did their maps.

Within the next 1,000 years,

the Romans were using maps

to help them build the greatest empire in the world.

They created maps of their towns, regions and colonies.

Many have been lost.

This is a copy of one of the few to have survived

and it's quite spectacular.

This is a map of the world in Roman times.

It's the longest map I have ever seen in my entire life.

It stretches all the way from Sri Lanka and India

down here in the east,

right along here to the furthest western point,

which shows the southern coast of Great Britain.

It is an absolutely extraordinary map.

It's six-and-a-half metres in length.

Scholars actually believe it was longer and that it's lost about

two metres, which rather tantalisingly

would have given us a much better picture of the British Isles.

Here's Germany, labelled Alemannia, just squeezed into a few centimetres

up here on the north coast of Europe.

There's the River Rhine running right along there.

And here's the Mediterranean,

like a long, snaking river, moving right down there.

And probably the most prominent landmass on the map,

not surprisingly, is Italy,

stretching right down here - there's Rome - it goes all the way down.

You can see the boot, and there's Sicily.

But nothing like we understand it today.

What's really striking about looking at this map

with the depiction of Europe, North Africa and Asia,

in this shape there's no way that this could be an

accurate representation of how the Romans saw the world.

The geography is obviously way out.

And yet there are some details of astonishing accuracy.

These red lines that criss-cross the map are the

famous straight Roman roads running across its surface.

And above them are symbols exhibiting the distance

between places in terms of leagues or miles, depending where you are.

There's Rome.

On the red Roman road, the Vatican.

the symbol just above it shows that it's just one mile.

But the map is covered with these kind of symbols.

You have another one here

which shows the distance from Strasburg, shown there,

to Mainz, there. What happens is that the Roman numerals tell you

how far you're going from Strasburg to the next town or village,

which is labelled with seven.

The distance here is 18.

All the way to Mainz, which is 74 leagues altogether.

Route markings, distances clearly annotated,

towns where people could stop off for the night.

These details led to the belief

that the map was the equivalent of a modern road atlas.

But just look at this map. It's hardly pocket size, is it?

Imagine strapping it to the back of a horse and then hauling it out

every time you lost your way.

As a route finder, it's completely impractical.

To understand the purpose of this map,

we need to look back to the time when it was created, around 300 AD.

By then, the Empire had already been under attack

from invading Barbarians.

To meet the threat, Rome's armies had expanded

and citizens lived in the grip of authoritarian rule.

But the map shows only peace and harmony.

Spa and bath towns are clearly marked all over the map.

So where are the fortifications and garrisons?

And where are the divisions between regions?

This seems to be a land without borders.

In reality, the Empire was divided and ruled by four competing leaders.

It's been suggested that this map of the Roman world

may have hung behind one of their thrones.

With its remarkable details of roads and distances, this map was designed

to give the impression of order and control.

So, while the Bedolina Map in the Alps promised the people a better

world to come, this map is trying to hide the fact

that the power and riches of Empire are under threat.

This map glosses over the messy, complex reality

of internal tensions and external threats.

Its main message is one of unity

and that made it an incredibly powerful political tool.

By the 12th century, sophisticated map-making

was an essential tool of imperial power.

And Chinese maps were among the most sophisticated on Earth.

I'm going to Pembroke College in Oxford to have a look at one.

It's called the Yu Ji Tu, and it was carved on to

a metre-wide stone that was erected in a Chinese schoolyard in 1136.

Remarkably, it has all the hallmarks of a modern map.

It shows the whole Empire from an aerial perspective

and the gridlines suggest it's drawn to scale.

But just how accurate is it?

Historian Hilde De Weerdt is using a special technique

to compare it with a 21st century map.

So we start out by picking a few points on the historical map

to map onto the modern map.

So in effect you're going to overlay the 12th century map

-onto the modern map.

-That's correct.

We will pick some places along the coast to start out with

and typically we want to pick a place that hasn't changed too much.

The first point we'll pick is a prefecture called Tai Zhou.

we see it here on the historical map.

One by one, Hilde picks out some of the towns and locations

that are marked on the historical map.

She then enters their modern co-ordinates,

allowing the map to be positioned against a satellite image.

First of all, it allows you to place a historical map very accurately.

The similarity between the maps is immediately obvious.

You can tell the coastline, the modern coastline, correlates to

the coastline as it is depicted on the historical map.

But the really astonishing thing is that the 37 locations

chosen by Hilde are remarkably close to their position on the modern map.

Wow, that's extraordinary, so that's an incredibly close fit between

the contemporary modern co-ordinates and the 12th century co-ordinates.

It is indeed quite striking

and we wouldn't be able to do that for a lot of other historical maps.

That's amazing!

We have no record of the surveying techniques used

to make this astonishingly accurate map.

And there's a mystery here.

For all its accuracy,

the Yu Ji Tu contains a number of glaring geographical errors.

The source of the Yellow River

is marked hundreds of kilometres away from its real location.

And here's a river which doesn't even exist.

So, what's really going on here?

The answer to this map-making mystery

can be found in the pages of this historical text.

It's called the Yu Gong.

It's a description of the landscape of China during the lifetime of

King Yu, a legendary leader from the 21st century BC.

The Great Yu was said to have had a comprehensive knowledge

of all of China.

And it was this book that formed the basis of all Chinese geography.

These writings were greatly revered by the Chinese.

It was almost a sacred text.

The name of the 12th century map,

Yu Ji Tu, translates as, "The map of the tracks of Yu".

This reveals its connection with the text of the Yu Gong.

The positioning of the source of the Yellow River

isn't the result of a 12th century survey.

It's been mapped according to the words of the Yu Gong.

That's why it's in the wrong place.

And that extra river over here, the Heishui, or "Black River",

is referred to in the Yu Gong,

so it was drawn on the map even though it didn't exist.

The map seems to be an attempt to portray an up-to-date image of China

without undermining Yu's ancient vision of the Empire.

12th Century map makers

must have known this information was inaccurate.

But the important thing was fidelity to Yu,

not geographical realism or accuracy.

Creating maps with this level of detail required huge resources.

It would be another 400 years before the means were available

to fund a national mapping project in England.

In 1539, Henry VIII commissioned a survey

of the entire English coastline.

But Henry didn't simply just want an impressive image of his Kingdom.

He wanted to defend it.

Local artists were ordered to make sketch maps of the coast.

Their drawings were sent to London,

where they were compiled into master maps for the King.

This is one of Henry's maps.

It's a giant birds' eye view of the coast,

all the way from Exeter, right down to Lands End in Cornwall.

It's a beautiful map, and it's a really, really important step in

the move towards geographical representation.

You see places in a level of realism

that the English had never seen before.

You've got Exeter in birds' eye view which is quite clear.

You have Plymouth represented here in a way that was completely new.

It's absolutely extraordinary.

The colouring, the whole detail.

This isn't just a beautiful map -

it's also an extremely strategic map with a very specific end in mind.

It's about coastal defence and it's about repelling invasions.

And we can tell that by looking at the forts that pepper

the entire coastline,

saying, "Made," "Not made" or "Half made".

So for instance here, we can see a fort that is labelled "Not made"

but it has quite clearly been drawn over

the coastal location at a later point.

so probably over several years Henry looks at this and says,

"This is where I need my coastal fortifications."

Divorce from his Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon

had led Henry to fear a Spanish invasion.

He wanted to build new forts like this to defend his realm.

To help identify where these defences were needed,

the mapmakers prioritised the most vulnerable places.

Certain areas, particularly inlets and sandy bays, where invading

forces could land, are mapped in absolutely minute detail.

Other areas of the map, for instance rocky outlets or cliff tops

where you can't really land a ship,

are not really mapped very accurately at all.

It didn't matter to Henry that this wasn't exactly to scale.

What really mattered to Henry was that he could now sit in London

and he could survey this entire coastline

and he could decide exactly what he wanted to do with it

and where he wanted to put his fortifications.

But the techniques used by Henry's surveyors were evolving rapidly.

In 1544, Henry's forces laid siege

to the French town of Boulogne and occupied it.

Two years later, he commissioned a map that would be accurate enough

for him to define the limits of his newly-conquered territory.

It's a forerunner to the Ordnance Survey maps,

and we can see that because of the

way in which he uses an aerial perspective.

It looks right down onto the land,

and it also has a detailed scale which we can see here.

One inch to a thousand feet.

This was one of the first times that Henry's surveyors attempted

an accurate representation of scale on a strategic map.

It's thought they measured distances by pacing them out.

They also used lengths of rope and compasses to check their findings.

It was one of the most accurate maps ever presented to the King.

Henry himself is believed to have marked out in a red line

the territory that he wanted for the

English, and it's one of the first times that an English ruler has used

a map to draw a political frontier.

Henry had exploited his great power and resources to

improve the technical precision and geographical accuracy of his maps.

But there was still a huge obstacle

to the accurate measurement and mapping of large areas.

The earth isn't flat like a map - it's a sphere.

Just over a hundred years later,

King Louis XIV of France was looking for a way to overcome this problem.

In 1663, he commissioned a map

of the whole of France to help consolidate his power.

This building, the Royal Observatory in Paris,

was at the heart of his ambitious plans.

When we think of a modern map, we tend to imagine an entirely

accurate representation of the world on paper.

The reason why I've come here

is because this is where that idea was born.

And it happened here because of an extraordinary collision of power,

politics and scientific progress -

the Enlightenment.

The leading astronomer at the Observatory

was Giovanni Domenico Cassini.

He found the solution to the problem of accurately measuring

distances across the globe in the science of astronomy.

Map-makers already knew how to measure latitude -

the distance north or south of the equator -

by observing the height of the sun.

But a way to measure longitude -

the distance east or west of a point - had still to be found.

Thanks to a dramatic increase in the power of telescopic lenses,

Cassini found the answer

by observing the eclipses of Jupiter's moons.

He timed the eclipses in Paris and then compared this with the time

the same eclipses were seen in Brest,

600km to the west of the city.

The apparent time difference between

the two observations was then used to help calculate longitude.

Cassini sent out teams of astronomers to record

the timing of the eclipses as they occurred along the French coastline.

This is just a sample of the voluminous correspondence

that came back to Cassini

here at the observatory by his surveyors spread right over France.

Every location that they went to,

they took detailed measurements feeding those measurements back

to Cassini to start put together an accurate measurement of longitude

right across France.

This is a letter from Brest with one of his surveyors

assessing the eclipses, giving an exact time at which they took place.

And this kind of precision

had never been applied to map making ever before.

Finally, in May 1682 the King's surveyors were able to present him

with the first true outline of France.

The coastline was revealed to be

astonishingly different from the way it appeared on earlier maps.

France was shown to be 20% smaller than all previous estimates.

Louis was horrified.

Science, said Louis, had cost him more territory

than any invading enemy.

The shape of the coastline was now established.

But there was an even greater task ahead -

to map out the whole of the interior of France.

In the mid 18th century, surveyors arrived here

at Chateau de Champs-sur-Marne just outside Paris.

They'd come to calculate the smaller distances

between a series of fixed points in the grounds.

To do this they used another scientific technique

called triangulation.

France was about to be divided into

hundreds of carefully measured triangles.

Historian of mapmaking, Daniel Schelstraete

is about to show me how it was done.

TRANSLATION: In order to create a triangle,

first of all they had to measure the distance of a straight line.

The problem back then

was that measuring it was very hard and took a long time.

So they had to find ground that was totally flat, or work

for several days stopping and levelling it,

which was very difficult.

And the rulers that were used were only four metres long.

Despite these difficulties, a straight line would have to

be measured between the two fixed points.

It was called a baseline and it formed the first side of a triangle.

Standing at one end of the base line, Daniel is demonstrating

how they worked out the rest of the dimensions of the triangle.

So, we want to look over there at the statue

which you can see is at the other end of the line.

And if you look through the lens,

you can see that the image is upside down.

And then we look over to the pigeon house through the other lens.

The pigeon house marks the third point of the triangle.

And then the instrument shows you the angle of the corner of the triangle.

75 degrees.

Now the task is repeated at the other end of the baseline

and a second angle is measured.

From this information the lengths of the other two sides of the triangle

can be worked out using the laws of trigonometry.

TRANSLATION: The operator would take the measurements

and then write them down in a notebook.

We're lucky to have an original notebook from these times

with the name of the operator,

and, "Observations made on the Plain of Paris and Meaux".

-So these are the measurements from this exact spot?

-Exactly.

So, here is the description. You have a chimney.

Here's a reference to the pediment.

And everything that was located would be written down.

And when it was necessary there are even a few sketches.

Obviously the secret, the impressiveness of creating these maps

lies in integrating all of this information across a whole territory.

It's all thanks to the principle of triangulation.

The dimensions of one triangle were used to create another.

Slowly, a network of triangles was used to calculate accurate distances between places all over the France.

This ambitious enterprise would transform the nation.

At that time, France was a collection of diverse regions,

each with its own identity.

There were hundreds of French dialects,

but now the whole country was slowly being brought together in one map.

The Carte de Cassini was finally completed in 1789,

by which time Louis XVI was on the throne.

Over 120 years, four generations of the Cassini family

had devoted their lives to mapping France.

This is the Carte de Cassini

and it's the first time I've actually seen it

and what strikes me, of course, as I open it

is that it's not just a map, it's a book of maps.

And this is the map of France.

Down the left-hand side, table of longitude and latitude.

You look at the map itself

and it's a series of squares created from the triangulation process.

Here is the whole French nation, mapped in exact scientific detail.

And if we turn to the map of Paris...

we can see all the regions of Paris mapped.

You can see the centre here

and that's where we are - down here on the observatory, just there.

And it goes right through the entire country.

Page after page are of different areas of France,

but the way in which they are being portrayed is exactly the same.

All the symbols, all the signs are standardised.

The symbols for forests...

..the symbols for rivers...

..the symbols for towns...

..and what's also significant here

is the fact that the language is also being standardised.

This is Parisian French.

Page after page is using the same kind of language.

Standardising the language, standardising the map.

The scale is also exactly the same.

Down here the scale bar, which tells you

exactly the scale that's being used on this map.

It's actually 1:86400.

It is that precise.

And it's staggering. To look at this is absolutely amazing.

This is standardisation, but it's beautiful standardisation.

These are maps for the King.

It wants to look beautiful as well as being precise.

But the map made to serve the King

was about to become a tool of revolution.

On the 14th July,

just as the finishing touches were being made to the map,

the revolutionary mob was storming the Bastille.

Two days later they invaded the Paris Observatory.

The new regime claimed the Carte de Cassini as national property.

They used it to help carry out their sweeping administrative reforms.

This was the map on which

the boundaries of the new departments were drawn,

the regional administrative units still used today.

The Carte de Cassini would have an even greater legacy.

It would help forge a powerful new national identity.

For the very first time in history, here was a map which centralised

and standardised an image of the nation, of France.

It allowed all kinds of regional variations to be subsumed into

one nation state image - the map of Cassini.

People could identify, despite their regional variations,

right across this map,

even with people that they'd never even meet.

It was an image of a unified nation state,

even when the country was being torn apart by the revolutionary terror.

This triumph of science and enlightenment

had become a potent political tool.

This was France as these revolutionary nation builders

wanted it to be.

One language, one nation, one map.

While the French were uniting around their new national map,

the British, with their expanding overseas empire,

were charting the oceans.

Captain James Cook was

one of Britain's pioneering explorers and navigators.

In August 1768, he embarked on an epic voyage bound for the Pacific.

The latest scientific inventions gave Cook's maps a new kind of

authority and the power to lay claim to the territory they depicted.

Cook's mastery of science and navigation confirmed him

as a great hero and genius of the Age of Enlightenment.

But on the island of Tahiti,

Cook met his match in a local navigator called Tupaia,

who'd never even drawn a map in his life.

Tupaia could sail across the Pacific,

a third of the earth's surface, without the use of paper maps.

This went against all of Cook's training and experience.

He was so intrigued that he asked Tupaia

to draw a chart of the Ocean,

showing the location of all the islands he knew.

This is a copy of the map Cook encouraged Tupaia to create.

The sheer scale of Tupaia's knowledge shown on this map

is absolutely astonishing.

74 islands, half of which weren't actually even mapped by Westerners,

but here they are being shown by Tupaia.

Cook wrote in his journal that Tupaia "knew more of the geography

"of the islands situated in these seas than anyone he'd ever met."

He said that any ship would be better off with Tupaia aboard.

Tahiarii Pariente is one of Tupaia's descendents.

A Polynesian navigator himself,

he's studied the techniques used by his ancestors.

The navigator had knowledge of the stars, he knowledge about climate,

he had knowledge about how the time would go by in a year,

so the difference between seasons.

I mean, there is no Polynesian culture without navigation.

We're islanders, so we hop from island to island.

For 3,000 years the Polynesians had been exploring and colonising

the islands of the Pacific.

They'd even reached America at least a century before Columbus.

Tupaia was drawing on ancestral knowledge

passed down through countless generations.

When you get out from an island, until it disappears

behind the horizon, you use the island as a bearing.

So then you start using the stars,

but then you don't have stars all the time, you have clouds, you have rain

then you use the wave patterns in the ocean

and you pull out certain fish and they know this fish only comes

that far away from the islands, or that kind of birds.

They know how far away they can fly,

so you have to understand what's around you.

When Tupaia drew his map he was encouraged to place his knowledge

within a western framework.

But on closer inspection, it reveals a Polynesian perspective.

Even the way of indicating direction is different.

All the Western maps here are north to south.

The one thing you see on every map is north.

We didn't really care about the north,

we only cared about is west because that's where everything goes.

That's where the sun goes down, where the stars goes down,

where the wind blows.

This map is the result of a clash, isn't it,

between two different ways of navigating?

There's a Polynesian way of navigating

and then there's the Western method that Cook uses

and they're in a sense colliding with each other.

They both work, but you can't really put them together, can you?

No. The Polynesian state of mind is totally opposite to the Western one.

We don't go anywhere, we stay where we are

and the island comes to you, or your destination comes to you.

So in Western navigation, we go to the island,

but in Polynesian traditions the island comes to you.

You don't move. The canoe don't move, it's your centre, it's where you are.

And if we look at this map, what's significant about it?

The scale, for example, on the map

is not related maybe to the real scale of the geographic place,

but maybe related to the importance of the place.

Like Rotuma is drawn really big,

but it does echo in a lot of legends, myths and stories.

So, it is big in history, not in width or height.

It's like a code.

If you don't have the key, you won't understand the message.

Tupaia's map is an extraordinary document,

and not only for what it shows

about Tupaia's deeply ingrained knowledge of the Pacific Islands.

Despite the great scientific leaps forward in the West,

Tupaia's map shows us that other cultures had different but equally

effective ways of navigating their way across the Earth's surface.

Back in England, the drive to make maps

with greater scientific accuracy was proceeding with military efficiency.

In 1784, here on Hounslow Heath, the army was taking up the challenge of

mapping Britain under the leadership of Major General William Roy.

Roy would use the same technique of triangulation as the French.

So the accuracy of his map

depended on the accurate measurement of a baseline.

General Roy was on Hounslow Heath

here, taking a measurement, a very precise measurement,

which would be the basis of the survey

that they would do to cover the whole of the country.

So they only need the one line to begin with?

Critically, yes. The distances which were calculated

across the country were based on this one measurement at the start.

To reduce the risk of error,

Roy had to measure a straight line at least 8km long.

The line was actually roughly measured

with a chain similar to this.

This one is only a 20 metre chain. The one that Roy had was 100ft chain.

It weighed about 18 pounds and you had five men to actually use it.

So five people would be dragging this out

rather than just the two of us.

Yes. Pulling this 27,000 feet.

Let's see if we can unravel it without getting some kinks in it.

OK. What do we do with kinks?

-We have to get rid of them.

-Oh, dear.

-So we'll have to... That's better. It's looking better.

-OK.

That's right. Sit your end of the chain against the marker point.

Yep.

And then you would come to this point and we would proceed along the baseline.

OK.

With the real chain, soldiers would have repeated the process

nearly 300 times to establish the path of the baseline.

OK. That's about right.

I can see my point behind you.

-You are on line, so if you could mark the spot, please?

-OK.

Roy then used 20 ft wooden poles to make a more accurate measurement.

But, in the British climate, wood proved to be an unreliable tool.

On wet days it expanded, on dry days it shrank.

Roy came up with a new solution -

a set of glass rods mounted on tripods.

To advance across the base, they would have then set up another tripod

and they would have inserted another piece of glass

and butted it to the end of this one here.

Then they would have just kept moving across the base.

So it's the same principle as with the chains,

but it's just more accurate?

That is correct, yes.

The glass was much more stable than the wooden rods were.

They didn't go out of true in the same way and they could have

confidence that their measurement across this base was much better

and the precision that they were looking for.

The measurement of the all-important baseline

took over four months to complete.

The same line formed the basis of the first

British Ordnance Survey map,

which covered the area

all the way from London to the south coast in Kent.

A memorial to William Roy's work

can still be found at the end of his historic line.

It's rather weird to find

this strange monument to our nation's mapping heritage

here at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac

on the outskirts of London.

The upended cannon reminds us

of the Ordnance Survey's origins in the military.

And here is a plaque

commemorating the achievements of Major General William Roy.

And it describes the fact

that "he conceived the idea of carrying out the triangulation

"of this country and of constructing a complete and accurate map

"and therefore laid the foundation of the Ordnance Survey."

And it also describes the measurement of the baseline

between King's Arbour and Hampton Poor House

as measured by Roy - 27,404.01ft,

which is just over 8km.

We now know that was only about three inches out.

Not bad going, really.

Thanks to William Roy's vision and determination, the whole of Britain

would be mapped using some of the most accurate measurements on Earth.

By the early 20th century,

the surveying of the rest of the world was underway

and just like Britain and France,

each nation took a different approach to the task.

As a result, there was a bewildering range of map-making styles using

different scales, symbols and languages.

But a bold new initiative set out

to create a map that could be understood by everyone.

It was called the International Map of the World.

International, because each country would create a map

of its individual territory according to agreed standards.

There would be 2,500 maps

and when they were all put together they would depict the entire world.

At a conference in Paris in 1913,

34 nations agreed to create a comprehensive series of regional maps

on a universal scale of one to a million.

They would be known as the Millionth Maps.

This is the millionth map of the South Coast of England.

This one shows North-Western America around San Francisco.

Both these maps look rather different

and that's mainly because of the varying terrain that they both show.

But there are also many similarities.

Greenwich is the prime meridian and relief is marked

by contour lines whose height is all measured in metres.

The colours are also completely standardised here,

so the roads are all in red, the railways are in black.

And, of course, the scale on this map is one to a million.

Each country would adopt the same set of standards

in the spirit of international co-operation.

The combined result would be a standardised map of the world

that was intended to transcend national differences.

But not every nation had the power and resources needed

to send surveyors into the unmapped territories of the world.

This shows the areas mapped according to the principles

and standards of the International Map of the World by the mid-1920s.

It's a fascinating snapshot of the world at that time,

and not only because it shows where had been mapped, but also by whom.

All these areas in Africa, at the time under French colonial rule -

Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Chad - are all mapped by the French.

Over in Indonesia, Dutch dominions here are mapped by the Dutch.

The British Empire, marked on the map here as GB,

is also mapping its own imperial territories.

Most of India here is mapped by GB.

Whole parts of East Africa, Southern Africa

and also parts of the Middle East.

Despite the project's best intentions, the Millionth Maps

were being used to further the imperial interests of the West.

By the outbreak of World War I, the project's original spirit

of international co-operation was fading away.

Far from transcending national differences,

the International Map of the World became an extension of them.

Up to 40% of all of the developing world's national borders

were defined and mapped by the British or the French.

Flushed with victory after the First World War,

they would use maps to consolidate their power in the Middle East.

For centuries, the region between Mesopotamia and Saudi Arabia

had been a land without fixed frontiers,

as this British army map from 1907 illustrates.

This is a map without divisions and boundaries.

What it shows is the movement of nomadic Arab tribespeople

across this whole region.

So if you look in the bottom left corner,

you have the Shammar. This is generally their region,

but they're also described as wintering up here.

So this is the movement of peoples being shown in a very fluid way

without any linear boundaries imposing restrictions upon them.

I belong to the Shammar tribe and the region of north Arabia

was predominantly populated by nomadic tribes

with their own territories.

But these territories, we can not describe them as rigid or fixed.

They had fluctuating boundaries.

These tribal groups would travel all the way up to the north

in search of pasture and water, but in the very, very hot months

they would actually retreat, either near oasis

or go even further, to a cooler climate.

So migration in that part of the world was a common feature of life.

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire

after the First World War, the victorious European powers

decreed that a new nation state was to be carved out of Mesopotamia.

It would be called Iraq.

The border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia was decided by two men

at a conference in 1922.

Sir Percy Cox of the British Colonial Office

had an uncompromising approach.

He wanted to draw a line straight through the desert.

For Ibn Saud, the King of Saudi Arabia, this was an alien concept.

Ibn Saud argued that to impose linear boundaries

upon his tribespeople was completely unsuitable

because it didn't work for the way in which they moved

and they transmigrated across this whole space.

What he suggested instead was to keep the boundaries fluid

and to keep them open.

This idea of making a map to reflect fluidity and openness

was mocked by the British.

This is an eyewitness account written about the conference

by one of the translators.

"At a private meeting, at which

"only Sir Percy, Ibn Saud and I were present, he lost all patience

"over what he called the childish attitude of Ibn Saud

"in his tribal boundary idea.

"It was astonishing to see Ibn Saud being reprimanded

"like a naughty schoolboy by His Majesty's High Commissioner,

"and being told sharply that he, Sir Percy Cox,

"would himself decide on the type and general line of the frontier.

"Sir Percy took a red pencil

"and very carefully drew in on the map of Arabia a boundary line."

So from that moment, these local tribal population,

brothers, lineages or clans, would find themselves divided.

Some of them would be part of Saudi Arabia,

others would have become Iraqis,

and yet another branch would have become Kuwaitis,

and they could not continue as animal herders

and therefore the animal economy collapsed because nomadism

was definitely based on the seasonal migration.

So economically, yes, the region was affected.

But in addition, networks of hospitality, of trust and solidarity,

all that had to vanish.

The precision of enlightenment science

had combined with the rule of Empire

to make a map with the power to destroy an ancient way of life.

Map makers throughout history

have created wonderful windows on the world,

and Western science has provided the tools

to make modern maps more accurate than ever before.

But the mapping of Iraq is a stark reminder

that maps can also be devastating tools of political power,

and we are still living with the consequences to this day.

In the next programme, maps show the way to heaven,

provoke prejudice,

and bend the world out of shape.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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