UN Wants to Right-Size Maps; Would it have Saved Trump from Iran Catastrophe?

On Friday, the UN General Assembly, in a non-binding resolution, voted almost unanimously for the adoption of maps that show the true size of Africa rather than continuing to use the Mercator projection, which makes Greenland seem the same size as Africa. Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. The United States, under Trump, was the only country to vote against the resolution.

Ironically, the Mercator maps probably misled Trump, who is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, into thinking that Greenland is significant enough to go to war with Europe over.

The Mercator projection is the most frankly Orientalist form of colonial knowledge in modern history. European mapmakers who considered drawing the world proportionately discovered that you could barely find on such maps the Netherlands and Portugal, then masters of the universe because of their big cannon-mounted ships built for the rough Atlantic. To be fair, they were also making maps for European navigation, and so wanted to show the sharp edges of then little-known territories, whereas a proportional map that recognizes that the world is not flat smooths those edges out.

As a historian of the Global South, I have long been incensed at the Mercator projection, against which I have fulminated in the classroom for 42 years. It disguises how large and important Latin America, Africa and South Asia are.

Africa is shrunken by the projection, but it is 3.7 times larger than the contiguous United States. Africa is enormous. You could overlay the maps of the U.S., China, India and most of Europe over Africa. I’ve mainly traveled in modest-sized countries there — Senegal, Gambia, Eritrea and South Africa, but even they are not small. I also lived about four years in Egypt, which is too big to fit into any US state but Alaska; it roughly the size of the entire eastern seaboard. Senegal is roughly the size of South Dakota. Eritrea, where I lived 18 months, is the size of Pennsylvania or Ohio, and, in African terms, it is a small country. South Africa is gigantic, the equivalent of California plus Texas. Texas may think it is big, but it is puny compared to Africa. I haven’t been there, but Algeria is the largest African country and is equivalent to the entire US west of the Rocky Mountains or the entire US east of Illinois, from Maine to Florida.

The French in the 19th century claimed Algeria as “French soil,” but in 1954-1962 the Algerians gained their independence. Algeria is more than four times bigger than France.

As for the New World, you can fit the entire lower 48 states of the US into Brazil, leaving the vastness of the rest of Latin America untouched.

The Mercator projection shows India as a little yellow triangle. But I’ve traveled around India by train and can tell you that it is 37% the size of the United States. If you overlay South Asia as a whole (including Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.) on the US map it would cover 57% of it.

Unsurprisingly, Brazil and India wholeheartedly supported the UNGA resolution.

Does it matter? Ambrose Bierce once observed that war is the way God teaches Americans geography. It is not as if they know it very well otherwise. You wonder whether Trump would have attacked Iran if he had known that it is as big as Germany, France and Spain combined, with a population as big as Germany plus Greece.

In military history, you want to know the size of the enemy’s territory and the size of its population, because the latter dictates the number of men it can mobilize militarily. In economics and business you want to know the same statistics, since they tell you the size of the market and the area that will have to be crisscrossed. Maps are practical instruments.

The Mercator projection arguably causes American and European policy-makers to underestimate Africa. Nearly one in five people in the world lives in Africa. It has the youngest population of any continent, with Europe and China greying. It has a high birth rate and its population will likely triple by 2100. If you’re selling widgets, those are the people you’ll be selling them to over the next 25 years. If you’re looking for young workers, that is where you will find them.

If you underestimate Africa, you will be losing out commercially and in every other way, and if you think sleepwalking into a war with Iran was a mistake, you don’t want to even imagine an African land war.