Spirit of the Age Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession

These are revolutionary times for maps.

They're being transformed by 21st-century technology.

In the past, it could take hundreds of years to make a map.

Now photo-real digital images can be made in hours and updated every week to create a virtual world of maps.

They seem to present a completely accurate, objective image of the world,

the triumphant culmination of thousands of years of map-making.

But from the Christian vision of the Middle Ages...

..to the elaborate symbolism of the Aztecs...

..and from the Victorian obsession with statistics

to Nazi propaganda...

..history reveals that maps are shaped by the beliefs,

rituals and prejudices of the people who make them.

Maps have always done more than just accurately represent the world.

And that's what really excites me about them -

they are unique windows onto past ages,

full of passions and anxieties of the people that made them.

And if we scratch beneath their surface, we begin to understand

how different cultures, different societies, have used those maps to define their faith,

to understand their environment, to impose order and structure on their teeming, chaotic worlds.

9th October, 1943.

Allied bombers above Hanover destroy much of the city,

including the state archives.

In the basement was one of the world's most precious medieval treasures - the Ebsdorf map.

The Nazis had just ordered its removal to safety.

But it was too late.

This rare insight into the medieval mind was lost in the rubble.

The Ebsdorf map was made at the end of the 13th century by the nuns of Ebsdorf Abbey in northern Germany.

Most medieval maps in Europe were made by religious orders.

They were the intellectual elite, and they also had the resources to create these wonderful works of art.

Fortunately, the nuns had photographs of the original Ebsdorf map.

So, after the war, they were able to make a magnificent copy of their lost treasure.

Wow!

I have been looking at reproductions in books of this map for years.

But to actually see it here, 10 feet tall, is absolutely breathtaking.

It's a spectacular map.

It's not really a map as we understand it in modern terms.

It's a kind of vast encyclopaedia of everything that was known to 13th-century Europeans.

It's totally unrecognisable to us as we look at it now,

but if you start to dig a bit deeper, it starts to make some kind of sense.

This is a map of three continents.

Asia sits at the top, that entire top half of the map.

Africa is right over here, running right down from here.

There is Africa, right down the coast.

And tucked in here, in the bottom left-hand corner, is Europa.

There's Anglia, England, down here.

But this is also a map of what is unknown to the 13th-century mind.

Looking again at the edges of the map, you start to see these rather monstrous figures.

Gog and Magog, these two fearful creatures.

Cannibals, monstrous figures, eating human flesh.

Also on the margins, the Massagets - children who eat their parents.

And if you go back over to this side into Africa again, the limits of the map, more monstrous races.

It starts with animals, griffin-like figures, snakes,

strange half-human, half-animal creatures here.

Figures with no eyes, with no heads. Creatures with no arms.

It becomes more and more monstrous as you run up the African coast.

But there are also more familiar, local features on the map.

Northern Germany is shown with its rivers and towns.

And the Ebsdorf Abbey is clearly marked, too.

TRANSLATION: The map comes from, and was created, in Ebsdorf

and it belongs here.

It's ours, and it's something we're very proud of.

What are your favourite images on the map?

I particularly love the representation of paradise, right next to the head of Jesus Christ.

It's an enchanting depiction.

Adam and Eve have both got an apple.

That is a sign for equal rights.

And a snake winds down.

The snake is fantastic, because it is not a feminine snake but a masculine one with a beard!

In the 13th century, the majority of people were illiterate.

They had to rely on pictures.

I think our map used to be of great importance to communicate to people and to confirm ideas.

The Ebsdorf map is a magnificent display of knowledge.

It was used by the nuns as a spiritual guide to present the Christian vision of the world.

This is clearly not about geography in the modern sense of the term.

This is a map about faith, and if you look at the centre of the map, all its locations are biblical ones.

You can see Galilee here.

You have Bethlehem with its little star there.

You can see Noah's Ark up here.

You can see the Tower of Babel rising up there.

It's telling a very specific story about the Christian faith and its forms of belief.

And right at the centre of the map is Jerusalem.

It's at the absolute heart of the map,

and within its walled city, an image of the resurrected Christ.

This is an image that puts Christianity right at the heart of the entire known world.

But there's also a hidden message lying at the heart of this map.

The viewer is being asked to think beyond earthly delights

and think about heaven, think about the next world that they're heading to.

And you can see this in the whole sweep of the map.

At the top, the head of Christ.

To the right and the left, his hands, and at the bottom, his little feet poking out.

This is a world defined by Christ.

Christ is the world and he's embracing it in a big theological bear hug.

While the Ebsdorf nuns were celebrating Christ's protective embrace of the world,

Benedictine monks in England were using a much more detailed religious map to find their way to heaven.

It was made 700 years ago by one of the most important historians in the country...

..a Benedictine monk called Matthew Paris.

And it looks much more like a map to be used on the road.

These beautiful pages are a pilgrim's guide.

They show a route map all the way from England

to the Holy City of Jerusalem.

It starts down here, with London depicted very precisely,

the city walls, you can even see St Paul's.

Then the roads go outwards down towards the Channel,

jump on board a ship, get to France.

Off you go down through Paris, passing important religious shrines,

powerful abbeys as you go.

The space between each town represented here

is one day's ride, so you know exactly how far you're travelling.

And you go down through Italy, passing... There's Rome.

Then you jump on another boat, go via Sicily, which is on a lovely little insert there, the flap.

Off you go through the Eastern Mediterranean...

..hit the Holy Land and your ultimate sacred destination of Jerusalem.

There it is.

But there's something very puzzling about this route map,

because the monks of St Albans who were using it weren't going anywhere at all.

Pilgrimage wasn't really on the cards for monks

because their way of living was based on a particular place,

and moving on elaborate journeys was not really part of their normal life.

If they had gone to Jerusalem, they may have been a bit disillusioned

when they saw the reality of it, because in their minds, Jerusalem was somewhere really special.

For the monks of medieval Britain, the place of Christ's death

and resurrection was tantalisingly out of reach.

How do you think that the monks might have used the maps?

They could have used them as part of their personal spiritual pilgrimage.

A monk's life is a pilgrimage which is centred on the cloister,

not on movement from one holy place to another.

So this map from England right to Jerusalem is a spiritual journey.

It's not a physical journey

but that actually becomes more powerful in a sense, the fact that that's what it's about.

I would say that, because I think medieval maps are about faith, knowledge.

What's the resonance for you, when you look at this?

Well, the personal resonance is a wonderful sense of place.

And I think that fits in very much with the Benedictine idea of stability, because stability is about

being rooted in a particular place, and there finding God, but also finding oneself.

I think you can see Matthew Paris in these maps trying to find God, but also finding himself en route.

Matthew Paris was making these maps to take Benedictine monks on a personal journey.

The aim was to save the soul through meditation and prayer.

Medieval Christian maps weren't really about defining territory.

They weren't really even interested in getting from A to B.

Their interest was getting people to focus on a higher spiritual realm,

on rising up above the Earth and reaching up to heaven.

200 years later, the ancient Aztecs were also using maps

to convey information about their own rituals and beliefs.

They give us a rare insight into one of the great empires of Central America.

One of their maps is part of a book called the Codex Mendoza, which describes Aztec life and rituals.

It was created by an Aztec artist in the 1540s.

At first sight, it doesn't look like a map at all.

To Western eyes, this image is almost completely alien.

But that's because the Aztecs

had a very different conception of space to us.

This is in fact a city map.

It shows the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan,

on the current site of Mexico City.

The city was built on a vast swamp, and you can see the canals

which run in this big blue X right through its centre.

And also, up here, you can see the main temple to the gods.

But down here, there's also a rather chilling reminder of the Aztec's obsession with blood sacrifice.

This is a skull rack, and sure enough, there is the skull of a defeated enemy.

The map is full of symbolic information about Aztec society.

The eagle sitting on a cactus on the rock

is a reference to the city's foundation myth.

It was said that the gods had sent the eagle to mark the spot where the Aztecs were to build their capital.

It remains the national symbol of Mexico.

Beneath the eagle is a shield with seven feathers

and a bundle of spears,

which symbolise the authority of the Aztec lords.

And beneath the city are triumphal images of two Aztec military victories.

But by the time this map was made, the Aztec empire had been conquered and colonised by the Spanish.

The map was commissioned by the Spanish governor Antonio Mendoza as a gift for the King of Spain.

Aztec artists were employed to create the map to show off the king's new territories and subjects.

So what were the native artists trying to tell him?

The key to understanding this map lies in these male figures all across the city.

And what they represent is its rulers, its elders,

and this incredibly important figure down here is the priest ruler.

You can tell it's him because he's larger than everybody else.

He's also painted in black body paint.

But surrounding him are these other male figures

who represent the rulers of particular zones

or neighbourhoods of the city.

Because this is a map about hierarchy, about a deeply structured society which wants to map its city

around these kind of issues, rather than where the canals run

or how the streets cut across the city.

Because that's the nature of Aztec society - top down, deeply structured, utterly hierarchical.

The native artists who drew this map were making a record of the glories of the old Aztec empire.

It's a defiant celebration of its power structures, its rituals and its beliefs.

The map is a record of a mighty empire conquered by the Spaniards,

but it's also a really poignant image of everything that the Aztecs had lost.

While the Aztecs were drawing symbolic images commemorating their own lost empire,

Europeans were making ever more accurate maps

to help them understand their newly conquered territories.

And maps were starting to look more like the ones we use to navigate the world today.

But even as they became more accurate,

they were still revealing the beliefs and prejudices of the age.

The British were increasingly curious about the inhabitants of Britain's far-flung dominions.

And in the 19th century, maps were a popular source of information.

Some of London's most fashionable maps were made by a prolific cartographer called James Wyld.

Wyld specialised in world atlases,

and in 1815, he made this elaborate map which he called a "Chart Of The World, Shewing The Religion,

"Population and Civilization Of Each Country".

It was an ambitious attempt to catalogue

all the available statistics about the population of the world.

Wyld even used a colour code to show the dominant religions in each part of the world.

Protestantism was green, Catholicism was red,

Jews were black,

Atheism was brown and Idolatry was a rather sickly yellow.

In the key to Wyld's map,

he describes all the different religious denominations -

Christians, Muslims...

And then he gets into some rather wonderful descriptions of Idolatry,

which he says is "absence, feigned or sincere, of religion",

which is apparently 153 million people.

He also has Atheism, which he describes as a state of "absolute ignorance".

There are apparently 30 million people who subscribe to that belief.

And you can see this being reproduced across the surface of the map.

And down here in the South Seas,

you get lovely descriptions of Fijians... "Cannibals".

Down in New Zealand... "Cannibals".

Cannibals, more cannibals and yet more cannibals.

In the Atlantic Ocean...

..a tribe called the Jagas.

"Their chief worship consists in frequent sacrifices of human victims, particularly children."

Wyld's map was made at a time when Britain's imperial forces

were spreading through India, Sri Lanka and southern Africa.

He used his map to satisfy his readers' curiosity

and confirm their worst fears about these unfamiliar native peoples.

There's even a scale to show how civilised each nation is,

which is in Roman numerals from one to five.

One is absolutely uncivilised and five is very civilised.

No surprise England gets top marks, gets a five. So does France.

But you look across the rest of the map,

and sadly the Hare Indians up in Canada only score a miserable one,

as do the Copper Indians, and so, sadly, do the cannibals

down in the South Seas, only coming in with a miserable one.

Wyld's map was an attempt to reassure his readers that Britain

and the British were at the pinnacle of civilisation.

It's really an expression of British fears, prejudices but also anxieties

about how to govern non-Christian, alien peoples that were now coming into the sway of the Empire.

In 19th-century Britain, the drive to gather statistics about the rapidly rising population at home

was also gathering pace and efficiency.

And maps were becoming powerful tools that could be used to identify social problems

and even save lives.

In 1831, a map-maker came to the rescue when thousands of people

across the country suddenly started dying of a mysterious disease.

Maybe you'd wake and 10% of your neighbours would be dead,

and that would be horrific

when you didn't have any idea what was going on.

It meant that a lot of people would just move,

pack up their stuff and leave,

to try and get away from this very, very quick death.

Victims writhed in agony, their muscles continuously spasming.

Once infected, they could die within hours.

Nobody knew what was causing the spread of the disease or how it could be stopped.

Once the outbreak had ended, over 32,000 people had lost their lives.

They called it the Blue Death.

It was Britain's first cholera epidemic.

As it swept across the country,

an apprentice surgeon called John Snow

was struggling to save the lives of infected patients.

Snow felt helpless as he watched victim after victim die.

But he was already beginning to develop an idea

about what was causing the deadly disease.

The scientists at the time were baffled.

Most of them thought that the disease was spread by a miasma of infected air.

But John Snow believed that it was caused

by tiny microorganisms, invisible to the eye.

He suspected that the sewers were contaminating the drinking water and spreading the disease.

When another cholera epidemic hit Britain,

Snow examined water samples from the drinking supply

of a cluster of victims in south London.

He found they were all contaminated by raw sewage.

This was the breakthrough.

In 1849, he published an outline of his theory to explain the transmission of the disease.

But nobody took him seriously.

Why didn't Snow manage to persuade people of his theory?

Everyone believed that diseases were spread through bad air.

And this was so strongly believed,

I guess you could compare it to Darwin's theory of evolution.

It was so radical, so ahead of its time, that people struggled to believe this was true.

To prove his theory and convince people to take him seriously, the doctor turned into a map-maker.

When cholera broke out again here in Soho,

Snow seized the opportunity to prove his theories once and for all.

He walked around, marking the deaths on a street map, house by house,

and sure enough, a pattern quickly emerged.

He realised that people who were drinking from the water pump on Broad Street were dying.

Snow's map plotted the deadly progress of the epidemic.

The cluster of deaths around the water pump seemed to confirm his theory.

He was so excited by this extraordinary breakthrough

that he rushed into a meeting of the parish guardians

and demanded that they immediately take the handle off the water pump

to stop the local residents from killing themselves.

The parish guardians were unconvinced by the vital connection revealed by Snow's map.

But after the deaths of 600 people in the parish,

they were prepared to try anything.

The handle of the pump was removed.

How do you think that Snow exploits the power of the map?

It was almost a PR technique of getting information, of getting a theory across.

We still use that very much today in terms of talking to policy-makers,

talking to people about what's going on

and showing them it visually on a map is a very nice way,

a very friendly, perhaps unthreatening way,

of getting something that's quite scientific across.

'Thanks to John Snow's pioneering work,

'maps are now a powerful weapon in the battle against disease.'

So what kind of things are epidemiologists looking at today?

It's very similar through the entire history of public health mapping.

It's whatever is the biggest public concern at the time.

So, in Snow's time, cholera was the big issue.

Now we're working on the things which are in the news of public interest.

There's lots of public health studies looking around climate change.

One of them would be looking at malaria

and how malaria may spread

if the climate changes as some predictions suggest.

Would it come back into Europe, for instance?

As the industrial cities of Britain expanded,

wealthy Victorians felt threatened by the ever-growing ranks of the poor.

Maps became tools for understanding poverty as well as disease.

How did the Victorians view poverty in this period?

They viewed it, I suppose, as one of the most major problems of the time.

The poverty question -

what do we do with the masses of urban poor

that had arrived and settled in the city during the previous decades of the century?

That was seen as a major concern for people.

The poverty question inspired a wealthy industrialist

to create one of the most sophisticated mapping projects of the Victorian age.

His name was Charles Booth.

Booth was inspired to act

when he heard the claim that 25% of Londoners were living in poverty.

Booth was sceptical, but he was also curious.

He decided to fund a team of researchers

to do a thorough assessment of levels of poverty throughout the city.

All the information would be carefully charted in a series of street maps.

The project would continue for 17 years.

Charles Booth was an unlikely man to try and map London's poverty.

He'd made a vast fortune in animal skins on the docks of Liverpool.

But the tanneries were terrified by his visits,

as he probed and catalogued every inch of his thriving empire,

and it was a habit that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Booth's hunger for statistics was fed by a team of investigators.

From hundreds of interviews and observations,

his team created a series of colour-coded maps

that showed the income levels and social classes of every street in London.

This is one of Booth's maps and it shows Limehouse,

one of the poorest districts in London at the time.

Yellow on Booth's maps denoted wealthy areas.

Pink and red were the middle classes.

Blue and black were the poorest.

And there's absolutely no yellow on this map whatsoever.

Booth often joined his researchers as they spread out through the streets of London,

gathering information on wages, working conditions

and what Booth called "social and moral influences".

This wouldn't be just a map. It would be an intimate social profile of the city.

Booth even lived with some of the families himself,

and he recorded his feelings in his notebooks.

He wrote about those living just above the poverty line that,

"The children have when young less chance of surviving

"than those of the rich,

"but I certainly think their lives are happier.

"They are more likely to suffer from spoiling than harshness,

"for they are made much of,

"being commonly the pride of their mother and the delight of their father's heart."

One interesting aspect of Booth's work is that prior to Booth,

poverty was seen very much as a morality problem,

and one of the things that he showed

was that poverty was not so much a problem of drunkenness

or unwillingness to work.

That was a very, very small part.

He saw poverty as being a complex problem,

and needed to be, therefore,

addressed through a whole variety of sources of information.

Booth's researchers scoured these streets,

making decisions about how they colour-coded the streets.

The kind of information that they were feeding back into the maps

were contained in these extraordinary notebooks,

where they wrote down every encounter in every single street.

They make for fascinating reading

to discover not only who they were encountering and what they were seeing,

but how that fed back into the maps.

Here's one entry. It says "Rich Street,

"Jamaica Place and Gill Street

"are a nest of brothels frequented by common seamen of every nationality."

Another - "This is a noted thieves' resort at Nightingale Lane.

"I knocked at the door of 13 Jamaica Street.

"They were a man and a wife and they kept an opium den."

So what is it that Booth's maps reveal?

For me, what's interesting is that it reveals that poverty is spread out throughout the city.

So you have pockets of poverty very, very close to areas of great prosperity.

It's showing that even if you were living in the West End of London, for example,

you weren't that far away from situations of severe poverty.

Poverty is just specks of black and dark blue

within a sea of much warmer colours of relative prosperity.

This is something that we can manage, that we can get to grips with, that we can handle.

Booth's extraordinary project provided graphic evidence

that helped prompt housing legislation

to improve living conditions in Victorian Britain.

It also fuelled a campaign to introduce an old age pension to alleviate poverty.

Booth's maps reveal that more than a third of all Londoners

were living in poverty - an awful statistic.

But somehow, by putting the problem on a map, Booth made it more manageable.

It seemed less terrifying.

And his maps also convinced Victorian society that something had to be done to help the poor.

By the end of the 19th century,

statistical maps were firmly established

as powerful tools to tackle the social problems of the age.

But maps, like statistics, could also be manipulated.

In the 1890s, Jewish immigration was a source of growing tension in the East End of London.

There was a housing shortage,

and families were often crammed into damp, vermin-infested houses.

Thank you. Cheers.

Thousands of Jews were arriving here in the East End every year.

Many of them were escaping really vicious persecution under the Russian empire,

but others were simply coming to make a better life for their families.

But at a time of high unemployment in this area,

the Jewish immigrants also created huge anxiety and quite a lot of anger.

They were seen as a burden on the state and also accused of taking local jobs.

A group of Liberal activists in the East End decided to do something to help.

First, they wanted to make a map to establish the true size of the Jewish community.

So they hired one of Charles Booth's researchers,

the son of a London cabbie, called George Arkell.

Once again, he began knocking on doors all over the East End.

George Arkell walked around these streets

trying to describe each and every Jewish household,

and this is the map that he produced.

It's a very simple, colour-coded image

that shows the exact percentage of Jews living in each and every street.

Arkell's map was published in 1900 as part of a book called The Jew In London.

It described the hard-working nature of the Jewish immigrants

and argued against any attempt to stop further immigration.

At the same time, the Conservative MP

for the East End constituency of Stepney was campaigning against the Jews.

He argued that they were bringing disease and crime to the city

and he compared them to grains of arsenic, poisoning the British family.

Arkell's map used bold, dark blue colour-coding

to mark out those streets where over 95% of the population was Jewish.

But by drawing attention to these streets,

it gave the impression that the Jewish community was larger than it really was.

And that wasn't the only problem with the map.

Arkell has coloured the heavily Jewish areas in heavy dark blue

and all the rest in red, as if to give the impression

that all the rest were somehow an indigenous population,

but it wasn't.

Yes, sure, we had Jews here, we had Irish here,

we had Protestants north of the railway lines.

Just a little bit further out, we had Italians.

There was an important German community.

So, this was an extraordinarily rich cosmopolitan area then,

as it is now, but you don't get that impression from this map.

-So, it's really inaccurate to label this Jewish East London?

-Of course it's inaccurate.

I think you've homed in on a very important point.

This isn't Jewish East London.

Most of this area...

What, two-thirds of it, three-quarters of it, is not Jewish at all.

It's the Jews within East London.

Sure, in a few streets, there was heavy density of Jewish population.

But over Arkell's East London as a whole,

the Jews formed a minority.

Arkell's map would have unintended consequences.

The year after it was published,

a fascist movement called the British Brothers League was set up in the East End.

They seized on this map.

It was quite often quoted in speeches by demagogues in the East End of London

speaking on behalf of the British Brothers League and so on.

"This is the proof that we have an alien community in our midst".

One of them said, if you go down Whitechapel High Street, he said, this is Jerusalem.

He actually used that phrase. And he drew attention to Jewish smells.

He said the smells in Whitechapel High Street were not English smells, they were Jewish smells.

Far from helping the Jews of the East End,

Arkell's map unwittingly became a powerful weapon in the hands of their enemies,

and within just five years, political pressure led to the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act.

It was the first peacetime legislation

to place limits and controls on immigration into this country.

In the 20th century, statistical mapping was firmly established as a powerful tool of government.

In 1940, these ordinary American citizens had no idea they were being watched.

Over 4,000 miles away,

someone was counting them and plotting them on a statistical map.

This was the result -

a map of America, seemingly rather innocuous,

with neat little pie charts

showing the percentage of European immigrants in each state,

and the countries down here

that they came from, but this is also a classified map.

It says up here in the corner, "For official eyes only".

This was a map that was made by the Nazis.

The map was part of a secret mission to flood America with Nazi propaganda.

By 1940, Hitler had already invaded much of Europe.

Britain was next on the list.

The British were trying to persuade the Americans to join the war against Nazi Germany,

but President Roosevelt was reluctant to act.

There is no demand for sending an American expeditionary force outside our own border.

There is no intention by any member of your government

to send such a force.

You can therefore nail any talk

about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.

The Nazis were determined to bolster Roosevelt's resolve to remain neutral

and they were leaving nothing to chance.

Using statistics from the latest American census, they were drawing up a map

that pinpointed the biggest communities of German immigrants living in the United States.

The large red segments in these little pie charts identified the best targets for propaganda.

The map revealed that the Nazis should focus their efforts in the rural communities of Missouri...

..Wisconsin,

Nebraska and Texas.

This was where public opinion could be most easily manipulated to oppose American intervention in Europe.

In 1940, this dry statistical map was actually a weapon of war.

Maps are incredibly powerful objects.

They touch the mind, but they also touch the soul.

They magically conjure up places that we've never even seen.

It's that power which leads them to being exploited or even perverted.

Sieg heil.

Heil. Heil. Heil.

Sieg heil.

The Nazis were masters of mass manipulation.

But they weren't just using statistical maps as weapons of propaganda.

In occupied Europe, they were also using them as tools of terror.

This is a map of Slovakia from the Second World War,

showing the population figures for the local towns and villages.

But this is also a sinister map,

because the Zs marked here show Romany Gypsy communities

and the black dots here, here, here and here

show the local Jewish population.

The maps were drawn up in 1941 by a Nazi expert in ethnography.

The Nazis passed them on to the president of the Slovakian puppet government, Jozef Tiso.

Under the Nazis, Tiso had already introduced anti-Semitic legislation

to prevent Jews from holding public jobs, attending schools or owning property.

Now he was under pressure to go further.

For the Nazis, these maps were blueprints for subsequent policy.

They allowed them at a glance to look at the dots

and see where the Jewish communities lived in this area.

And just a year later in March 1942, they started rounding them up from the towns and villages here.

The Slovakian Jews were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps.

Within six months, 58,000 men, women and children had been taken.

This neat statistical map of Slovakia was being used to drive the so-called "Final Solution".

In the hands of the Nazis, maps had become tools for genocide.

After the Second World War, revelations about Nazi atrocities

and the ideological tensions of the Cold War created a generation suspicious of government.

The authority of maps also came under scrutiny.

In May 1973, a German historian called Arno Peters confronted the map-making establishment.

He denounced the most famous map of the world

and said it was distorted by political and cultural prejudice.

This is the map generations of schoolkids have grown up with.

It's the famous Mercator projection.

But Peters shocked the world when he announced that this map was quite simply wrong.

He pointed out that Mercator was distorting the size of countries in an attempt to retain their shape.

As a result, Europe looks far more prominent, whereas the developing countries are being downplayed.

If we look at Africa and Greenland, they look about the same size.

But Africa is actually 14 times bigger.

Peters condemned this map as being imperialist and racist.

Peters was no cartographer, but he thought he had the solution.

Taking account of the relative size of each country,

he came up with a new formula for representing the globe on a map,

and he called it the Peters projection.

Peters claimed his map showed the true size of countries for the first time ever.

He dramatically reduced the size of Europe

whilst expanding the size of Africa, elongating South America,

and it's still something of a shock to look at this map

and see how large these two continents loom on the Peters projection.

Peters regarded himself as a champion of what he called the "non-white peoples",

and he saw this map as part of a wider project

to right the wrongs that he saw as being perpetrated

against those people living in the developing world.

Arno Peters invited nearly 300 members of the international press

to the unveiling of his new world map.

The media embraced it with enthusiasm

but professional cartographers were furious at what they saw as the cheek of this outsider.

They called the map deceptive, absurd, illogical.

They were clearly really annoyed at what they saw

as an untrained cartographer trying to map the world,

and they accused Peters of making a map that was full of errors.

TRANSLATION: The reaction was very disappointing for Arno Peters.

It was in sharp contrast to the great enthusiasm

of the international press.

The map-making establishment saw it as a fundamental criticism of their profession.

Peters was disappointed, even shocked.

But he stayed optimistic, and said, "This map will prevail, because it will succeed internationally".

And the Peters projection DID become an international mapping phenomenon.

Anyone who wanted to display their liberal credentials pulled down their Mercators,

and proudly replaced them with the Peters projection.

It was championed by Oxfam, the United Nations and the Catholic Church,

and it's sold more than 80 million copies across the world.

But the Peters projection did have distortions of its own.

Despite all the success and adulation, the critics did have a point.

The Peters projection WAS flawed, and it wasn't even accurate on its own terms.

Peters had made some basic miscalculations

which meant that countries like Chad and Nigeria were twice their actual length.

Did Peters ever accept that there were inaccuracies on the map?

He was certainly prepared to accept mistakes.

But no argument convinced him,

because everything had been calculated.

Every point had even been recalculated to a specific formula

developed by experts.

He kept on checking, and no mistakes were found.

Arno Peters was attacking other maps for being biased,

yet he was blind to the fact that the Peters projection

was just as distorted by his own political assumptions.

But the Peters projection did do something quite extraordinary.

It finally exploded the myth that maps can ever be 100% accurate,

scientific, objective representations of the world.

It showed that maps always have social and political agendas.

Arno Peters not only transformed the way we look at the world.

He also changed the way we look at maps.

There is no such thing as a neutral map.

You're kidding yourself if you think you're a neutral cartographer.

Since the 1970s,

radical map-makers have been building on Arno Peters' legacy,

deliberately using maps to promote alternative views of the world.

If you think the Peters projection was strange, what about these maps?

These images are so distorted

that you can hardly tell that they represent the outlines of countries.

They look more like peculiar pieces of abstract art.

But they represent a very special kind of map

and it's a map with an urgent and very powerful political agenda.

These images are part of the Worldmapper project, launched in 2005.

They use statistics compiled by the United Nations to redraw the map of the world.

These images draw attention to some of the greatest problems facing humanity in developing countries.

This map shows HIV infection across the globe.

Tragically, Africa dominates the entire map.

India and Southeast Asia are also large, Europe reduced very small up there.

This one shows refugee destinations, and the shape changes again.

This time, places like Sri Lanka become massively distorted, as does South America.

And rather interestingly, so does the Middle East.

Here, teenage pregnancies.

India, now, is the most dominant figure,

with the highest number of teenage pregnancies,

in contrast to Japan, which is only a speck,

with the lowest rates.

And finally, this map.

Infant mortality rates.

Again, India and Southeast Asia loom large,

but the map is once again dominated by Africa,

with the largest number of babies dying under the age of one in the entire world.

What was your aim in making these maps?

I thought that now we had all this information

about almost everybody in the world,

it should be made much more widely available.

I mean not just the numbers being available,

but the actual picture of what it was showing being made available,

so that people around the world

could see what was being counted about them, what was known about their lives,

then you could decide for yourselves what you felt about it and what you wanted to do about it.

And that's the power of the map.

I'm fascinated by how you see that importance

that the map does something that text can't do.

What is it that the map can give us?

What does the map give us?

The map taps into a whole part of our brain and our imaginations which text doesn't do.

It's like looking at a face or looking at a picture.

You first of all see the kind of eyeline of the map

and it taps into different emotions.

You can't take a ratio of numbers and become that concerned about it

but when you see a picture, it appears to be real.

It's very different.

These maps, with their swollen and shrunken countries, are a dramatic call to action.

They take a mountain of statistics which are usually so easy to ignore,

and provide shocking clarity,

a profound understanding of the most pressing problems that face our world today.

The Worldmapper project captures the spirit of the digital age -

globally aware, visually sophisticated and technically innovative.

And when it comes to navigating our way around the planet,

today's photo-real online maps from companies like Microsoft and Google

can take us anywhere in the world at the click of a mouse.

From their corporate playground here in Zurich,

Google Earth routinely sends out cars with mounted cameras to map our roads...

..cameras on tricycles to get into heritage sites,

and aerial teams to capture the big picture.

These images are combined with satellite photographs

and then wrapped around a 3D model of the Earth

to create an instantly accessible virtual world.

It's the technology that only a few years ago would have been impossible

outside of defence departments or, you know, the CIA.

And now you have access to that information

and you can fly around the world with very high rates of frame update -

ie, it looks very smooth -

and there's a massive amount of very clever technology going on behind the scenes.

You can explore as if you were flying over the Alps

in a jet fighter from your home, and that's amazing.

Google Earth has been downloaded by over half a billion people worldwide, and it's no surprise,

because there's something incredibly exhilarating

about seeing our planet suspended there in space,

hurtling down through the layers and coming to rest in your own street,

which is what most people do when they usually log on to Google Earth.

And this is Oxford. This is where I live.

That's my own street

and that's where I get my coffee in the morning.

This is a miniature version of the Earth at our fingertips.

The world now seems open and accessible to all.

Digital maps produced by online companies all over the world

are helping to redefine the relationships

between global corporations,

national governments and individual citizens.

One of the things that surprised us

was how quickly Google Earth became a tool for people,

individuals, organisations to communicate their idea,

whatever they had a concern over.

In the Amazon, there was a tribe that we got to know

who had, for many years, avoided civilization,

so they didn't have a culture of writing reports or creating maps.

But nevertheless, they were in an area

that was under environmental pressure from logging and so on.

Because they could recognise their local area from images,

they were able to use Google Earth

as a tool to delineate their tribal areas

and then use that information

to fight their case.

Maps have also been used to mobilise international public opinion.

In places like Darfur, the mapping has taken on even more political resonance, hasn't it?

Yeah. A few years ago, when the atrocities were happening in Darfur,

we worked with an organisation in the United States

to actually show people pictures of villages that had been burnt.

You could actually see the circles that were people's huts

that had been burnt.

That had a huge human impact.

For hundreds of years, maps have been used

to do so much more than help us navigate around the globe.

From the spiritual meditations of the medieval Catholic Church

to Victorian anxieties about immigration, poverty and disease,

maps have been used to help us carve up, manipulate and make sense of the world.

Digital maps are now being used in the same way.

They feed our hunger for instant information

and define our fears for the future of the world in the 21st century.

Human beings have been making maps of one sort or another ever since we first walked the Earth,

and what I've always loved about them is the fact that they define our world

rather than simply reflecting it,

and they'll continue to shape who we are and what we do as humans, whatever our future.

In the next programme, maps inspire an age of discovery,

the naming of America,

and an international treasure hunt.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]