Interesting Political Take on the Mercator Projection
KertDawg
Administrator, ProFantasy 🖼️ 4 images Surveyor
For my fellow map nerds: Here's an article about the African Union's effort to use a different projection on school maps because Mercator makes the continent look small. That's true, but looking at a map next to a globe was always interesting in school. I hope they teach the children why the projection change makes a difference.
I'm sure Greenland and Antarctica will be next. 😆
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/african-union-urges-adoption-world-map-showing-continents-true-size-2025-08-14/
Comments
Hey no politics on the forums. (just kidding)
Wait...were maps the start of politics, or politics the start of maps?
Doesn't Google maps represent it's true size once you zoom in a bit? Do they want everyone to change maps, or just themselves.
Are all the African countries going to pay for people to change maps? Where do the questions stop?
Then I think Canada should demand a line that goes around the globe 9 times to show how much coastline we have.
Hahahah! They're not prepared for the Coastline Paradox.
I think this is an AU situation, but they're hinting at it for the world. I think my old elementary school still has the same maps from the 1950s, so good luck with that.
It's likely that ancient cartographers had a tendency to make the country their commissioner was lord over look bigger than it really was. Flattery goes a long way when there's no proof that things are otherwise and you might be executed for making it look smaller than the last cartographer did.
Can't do that today, of course - except by changing the projection. I have always wondered why each country hasn't produced their own hemispherical projection with the heart of their own country at the centre.
Mercator gets angles right for navigation, at the expense of area. There are other projections that get area right, at the expense of angles. One or the other can't be avoided on a flat map of a spherical area. The only accurate map is a globe.
Interesting broader discussion here. The earliest surviving topographical (known-)world maps tend to show the map creator's country/city in the centre, and many are circular around that point. Wikipedia's Early World Maps page has some useful illustrations in this regard. While that may have had a political motive, there's also an eminently practical one, because then you're able to draw the world moving out from where you started.
Into the medieval period, European maps often had the eastern end of the Mediterranean as their central point, because of its significance for the dominant Christian religion there at the time, and were drawn as circles or ovals out from that area.
If the region around your home site ends up larger and more detailed, that's at least as likely because you'll have more, and far better, information about that area than any other, which you might visit - if at all - maybe once in a lifetime for a few hours to days, in ancient to medieval times. So there doesn't always need to have been a political-patron motive there, significant though that undoubtedly was for some early cartographers.
Maps for planning intercontinental aircraft journeys are still prepared with the originating airport at the centre, and extend out in a circle from there, for instance, to allow the selection of the great-circle line required to reach the destination in the minimum of time, using the least fuel possible.
For example T&O maps. They centered the T on Jerusalem and had Europe (west) at the top to signify that the creator lived there.
OK, Aussie here. We need a far more radical revision. Not only a map reflecting true land size (good bye England), but the South pole in its rightful position at the top of the page!!!!!
@Wyvern, that early world maps link is awesome. I am in a Pathfinder campaign right now and my owl familiar is named Anaximander after the creator of the first mapper there. Love that his world map has Europe, Asia…and Libya.
@Quenten, love that orientation. When I designed my campaign world in FT, it didn’t look quite right…so I flipped it upside down. Sometimes things look better that way. Of course, now the latitudes in the northern hemisphere have negative numbers but I can deal with that.
I'm getting a headache, bloods rushing to my head.
How about this:
https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/14300/xkcd-bad-map-projection
One of my fav maps of all time is the fish map of the world. Maybe all countries should use that.
One story of why Mercator maps are widely used is that there were huge numbers of navigation maps available at the end of world war in and they found their way into schools as part of war surplus. Mercator maps are great if you want to go from one place to another by following a straight line on a map, but pretty much useless for most other purposes.
One of the early intended design features for ft was a distortion and blackout map associated with views, but I ran out of time and interest. It was associated with a vague notion of wanting to add per-view vector chrome and cultural scales, but now it's really into complex user experiences.