How Mapmaking Evolved and Shaped the Modern World

I'm going left to my favorite 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 Casey runs it and we always have a joke. Then I come out of there, go left, curve down here, big new build place here. I'm intrigued at what's going to do to the house prices in the area, so I'm always looking to see how that's going on. And then I keep left, cross a bridge which goes over the canal. And I'm going right along here, passing all the boats, and then I'm going up right here. Go left and there I am. I'm out into Oxford station and there in 10 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 onto different times and different cultures. The 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 out. It's dead to me. I've edited out what I don't want. I'm doing what map makers 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 program, I'm going back to where map making began. I'll find out what first drove people to create maps even before they could write and how they then 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, which 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 one of the oldest 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 learned how 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 really interesting is that there's clearly a structure, there's a kind of 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 Camunni, at a critical moment in their history.

3,000 years ago, the Camunni 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 rock art from the archaeology that in Valcamonica 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? Uh I think that this group of people, these aristocracies, 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 drew the map probably to represent not a real landscape, but to represent an ideal landscape. It was some sort of uh supernatural representation of the landscape as it should be after you and after your sons 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 Camunni 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's an absolutely extraordinary map. It's 6 and 1/2 m in length. Scholars actually believe that it was longer and that it's lost about 2 m, which rather tantalizingly would have given us a much better picture of the British Isles.

Here's Germany labeled Alemania just squeezed into a few centimeters 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 snaky river running right down there. And probably the most prominent land mass on the entire 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. And 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

can 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 crisscross 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 on where you are. And there's a good example of it here. There's Rome on the red Roman road, the Vatican. The symbol just above it shows that it's just 1 mile. But, the map is covered with these kind of symbols.

You have another one here, which shows the distance from Strasbourg, to shown there, to Mainz there. And what happens is that the Roman numeral tells you how far you're going from Strasbourg to the next town or village, which is labeled with seven. The distance here is 18. All the way to Mainz, which is 74 leagues altogether. Route markings, distance is 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? Can you imagine strapping this to the back of your 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 mapmaking 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 onto a meter-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 grid lines 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 an early 12th century map onto the modern map. That's correct. Okay. We'll pick some places along the coast to start out with. And then, typically, we want to pick a place that we know 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 coordinates, 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 coordinates and the 12th century coordinates. 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 kilometers 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 mapmaking 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 possessed 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. 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 Hei Shui 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 mapmakers must have known that 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. And 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 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 bird's eye view of the coast all the way from Exeter right down to Land's End in Cornwall.

It's a beautiful map and it's a 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 bird's eye view which is quite clear. You have Plymouth represented here in a way that was completely new. It's absolutely extraordinary, the coloring, the whole detail. But 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 defense and it's about repelling invasions and we can tell that by looking at the description of the forts that pepper the entire coastline. Saying made. Not made. Or half made. So for instance here, we can see a fort which is labeled not made but it's quite clearly been drawn over the coastal location at a later point. So probably over several years, Henry looks at the entire scene and he 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 defenses

were needed, the mapmakers prioritized the most vulnerable places. Certain areas, particularly inlets and sandy bays where invading forces could land, are mapped in absolutely minute detail. Other areas on 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 map was not exactly to scale. What 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, where he

wanted to put his fortifications. Henry's realization of the power of maps reflected a sea change in European attitudes to cartography. But to all intents and purposes, his coastal map was still just a picture, more art than an accurate representation of geography. It was in 17th century France under the patronage of the Sun King, Louis the 14th, that the crucial component of modern mapmaking fell into place. When we think of a modern map, we tend to imagine an entirely accurate representation of the world on paper. The reason I've come here is because this is where that idea was born. It happened here at the Paris Observatory because of an extraordinary collision of power, politics and scientific progress, the Enlightenment.

King Louis wanted to make a map more accurate than any other but there was still a huge obstacle to the true measurement and mapping of larger areas. The earth isn't flat like a map, it's a sphere. 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 signs of astronomy.

Mapmakers 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, 600 km 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 to 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 mapmaking 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 Château 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. 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 leveling it, which was very difficult. And the rulers that we used were only 4 m 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 baseline, 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°. 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. 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 plane of Paris. So these are the measurements for

this exact spot. Exactly, yes. So here is the description. You have a chimney. Here is a reference to the pediment. And everything that was located would be written down. And when it was necessary, there were even a few sketches. Obviously, the secret, the impressiveness of creating these maps, lies in integrating all 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 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 the 16th 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 this isn't 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 it 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 center 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 of different areas of France. But the way in which they're being portrayed is exactly the same. All the symbols, all the signs are standardized. The symbols for forests, And what's also significant here is the fact that the language is also being standardized. This is Parisian French. Page after page is using the same kind of language. Standardizing the language, standardizing 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 to 86,400. It is that precise. And it's staggering to look at this is absolutely amazing. This is standardization, but it's beautiful standardization. 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 of 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 centralized and standardized 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 at the time that 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 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 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 that 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 the

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. A Polynesian navigator himself, he studied the techniques used by his ancestors. Well, the navigator had knowledge over distance, and knowledge about climate, they had knowledge about how the time would go by in a year, so the difference between seasons. I mean, there is no Polynesian culture with without navigation. We are

islanders. So, we hop from islands to islands. For 3,000 years, the Polynesians had been exploring and colonizing 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 disappear 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. Then you pull out a certain fish. 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-south. The one thing you see on every map is north. Mhm. 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. That's where the stars goes down. That's where the wind blows.

This map is the result of the clash, isn't it, between two different ways of navigating? There's a Polynesian way of navigating and 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 set 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. don't move. The canoe don't move.

It's your center. It's where you are. And if we look at this map, what's particularly significant about it? The scale, for example, on the map is not related maybe to the distance on 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 and myths and stories. So, it is big in history, not in width or height. It's 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. By the early 20th century, the mapping of the world was well underway and each culture and 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 1/2 thousand maps and when they were all put together, they would depict the entire in Paris in 1913, 34 nations agreed to create a comprehensive series of regional maps on a universal scale of 1 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 northwestern 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 meters.

The colors are also completely standardized here. So, the roads are all in red, the railways are in black, and of course, the scale on this map is 1 to a million. Each country would adopt the same set of standards in the spirit of international cooperation. The combined result would be a standardized 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 the 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, which at the time are 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 cooperation was fading away. Far from transcending national differences, the International Map of the World became an extension of them. Up to 40% of all 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 down here in the bottom left-hand 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 cannot 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 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, this 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, so economically, yes, the region was affected. But in addition, networks of uh 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. Mapmakers 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.