Maps have always been political

For centuries, humans have used primitive and advanced technologies to understand the Earth precisely, writes Katherine Dunn. But politics and science refuse to give us stable objectivity

Some time around 250 BC, Eratosthenes – a Greek poet, mathematician and chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria – looked into a well in Syene, which is now the city of Aswan in Egypt, and saw the shape of the Earth.

It was the summer solstice, and the light of the sun shining directly overhead disappeared neatly into the darkness of the well. At exactly the same time, Eratosthenes later realized, the sun was casting a shadow in Alexandria. The astronomer already believed the world was round, but by comparing the shadow with the distance between the two cities, the librarian was able to estimate its rough circumference, and with remarkable accuracy.

This was the founding legend of geodesy, a heady mix of physics, math and astronomy that comes from the ancient Greek word meaning “to segment the Earth.” It is the quest to understand the planet’s true shape, its relationship with time, and the forces of gravity.

Eratosthenes, who bisected maps with vertical and horizontal lines in what became the forerunners to longitude and latitude, attempted a kind of objective, scientific rigour to how we understood the Earth. But it only took a century for politics to muddy the picture. In the second century BC, the astronomer Ptolemy published the book Geography, which was collated and illustrated into one of the seminal early maps of the “world,” as he saw it; it depicted the reach of the Roman Empire, the equator bisecting the globe in the middle, with “poles” on each end. It was a visualization, in other words, of conquest.

It is easy to imagine our map of the world as accepted and unchanging, with the seeming inflexibility of rock and ocean. With access to the Global Positioning System (GPS) on our phones, we engage with maps so continually and unthinkingly – on the way to work, to see friends, to order food to our doorstep or to plan a run – that it’s no surprise we get used to feeling as if the ground underneath us is fixed and unmoving, parked on a stable and precise grid.

But there is no true objectivity, even in our understanding of how the world looks; our viewpoint has always been political. Conflicts or treaties might change borders, or merge them. Places may change name by government dictum, such as U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the “Gulf of America” after more than 425 years.

The human relationship with maps has the ability to do something that feels remarkable and fundamental: reshape how we see the Earth, and unmoor us from our sense of time and space itself.

Humans have a long history of mapping and navigating long distances, whether it’s in search of meaning beyond their own lives or for pure political or economic conquest.

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Polynesians sailed across the Pacific, relying on their senses and the patterns of the stars, the flows of currents and the tides. From the late 10th century, the Vikings explored the North Atlantic. The Islamic Empire traversed the Indian Ocean, and Chinese dynasties traded across Southeast Asia, using complex compasses equipped with magnetic needles. In Canada, Indigenous communities were creating maps long before Europeans arrived, marking territory and routes and governing where families or communities could live.

But from the 1500s onward, European sailing maps, inspired by Ptolemy’s grid design, attempted to produce a fixed, unchanging – and European – picture of the world. The results were decidedly mixed.

The horizontal lines, or latitude, were relatively simple to establish; the equator is fairly easy to identify through the orientation of the stars. But longitude – the vertical lines – have always been much harder to pin down. The issue is that the world’s rotation doesn’t have a fixed starting or ending point – after all, the globe never stops – so the location of the meridian, or the “zero point” of longitude, is essentially a matter of opinion. It’s no surprise that colonial map-makers tended to place the meridian wherever they themselves were based, which was usually a European capital. As the scientific historian Dana Sobel argues in her book Longitude, latitude is nature – longitude is politics.

In part because of this unstandardized approach, early European maps of North America were often decidedly misinformed, or outright weird; large sections of land were missing, or they depicted the continent in odd shapes or with vast inland seas. For a ship sailing from Europe to the Americas from the 1500s through the 1700s, these distortions weren’t just philosophical. Navigators had to rely on “dead reckoning,” a navigational method that forms a crucial and practical link between time and space: calculating the

Different countries had separate systems, but the best known ones had a clear purpose: Better navigation meant it was easier to bomb the right town.

ship’s location based on where it started, how fast it’s going and how much time has passed. This was often dangerous; ships tended to get lost. But the alternative required travelling by slower waypoints, the same way that we might stick to main streets rather than cutting through a more direct but less straightforward route.

To make it more efficient to sail between, say, Britain and Canada, navigators needed either a way to calculate their location from the stars, or a more robust and accurate clock – one that could withstand the rough seas and temperature swings of a long journey. The major innovation eventually came in the form of the marine chronometer, but the race for better maps and better clocks didn’t stop there. By the interwar years, the rise of postal mail by air and the first commercial airlines had produced the “airways” of the skies, and a Canadian engineer had invented the more accurate quartz clock. And by the Second World War, the forerunners to today’s satellite navigation systems were in their infancy, broadcasting rudimentary, radio-beambased highways.

Different countries had separate systems, but the best known ones had a clear purpose: Better navigation meant it was easier to bomb the right town. Warfare was a motive that carried over into the Cold War; in 1958, just months after the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik, American physicists at the Applied Physics Laboratory began work on what would become the Transit satellite navigation system, the forerunner to GPS. Transit was built for one major client: U.S. Polaris nuclear submarines. If you were going to launch a nuclear missile at Moscow, you needed to know exactly where the missile was – and, for that matter, where Moscow was. It was just a bonus that it turned out that the Transit system had so many other uses, including helping to map the Canadian Arctic.

The Global Positioning System, which was originally built to enable precision bombing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, had similar, unexpected effects. GPS was built to drop bombs; today, it really does it all, and all at our fingertips.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, mapping has become more and more precise. And yet, there is no such thing as a truly perfect map. The mere process of making a map flat, and therefore readable on paper and screens, requires reshaping and distorting the world’s complexities – and often in ways that reflect our own biases and priorities. While some continents and oceans are squeezed, others are stretched (notably, Greenland). By necessity, even very complex maps serve as mere snapshots – moments in time that can’t fully capture the way the Earth is constantly lurching, shaped by its shifting plates and swirling tides. In its fullest sense, then, the Earth is almost impossible to fathom – a planetary caveat to what we understand about the rules that govern time and space.

From a practical point of view, this complexity poses endless challenges. To try to bridge the gap between reality and usefulness – to find a comprehensible route between A and B, for instance – we use shortcuts. These shortcuts are, essentially, math.

This model, which still involves mind-boggling levels of complexity, is a figure called the geoid. The geoid is based on “mean sea level”: that is, the sea level if water extended around the globe unrestricted by land or mountains or cities, shaped only by the forces of gravity. The result is a shape with a smooth but uneven skin, swelling where gravity is strong (the Arctic), and dipping where it is weak (the summit of Mount Everest). Essentially, the geoid resembles a lumpy potato.

There is also another, even simpler model: the ellipsoid. This is the far smoother orb that evens out those gravitational hills and valleys, approximating the Earth in a more familiar way, slightly flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. Basically, this model swaps out the potato shape, and replaces it with a grapefruit. (Fruits and vegetables are common metaphors in the world of geodesists.)

One of the first major models of the geoid was used as the reference map for the Transit navigation system. The next, developed in the early 1980s, became the World Geodetic System 1984, or WGS84. This map directly influences how you experience the world, because it is the reference map on which GPS is based. When your floating blue dot moves along streets on a templated map on your phone, your GPSdefined location is moving along the surface of the geoid. The Earth is below your feet, yes – but your location is mostly the product of physics and math, the legacy of mathematicians, satellites and powerful U.S. military computers.

So there is always some slippery gap between theory and truth in how we understand the Earth – it’s just a matter of by how much. GPS has its discrepancies; in 1997, the Statue of Liberty’s real location and its GPS location were off by several yards, and in 2007, satellite imagery revealed that Hans Island, then a disputed 1.3square-kilometre island between Greenland and Nunavut, was slightly east of where the Canadian map had placed it. In the end, a political line was drawn: Canada and Denmark settled the dispute in 2022 by splitting it through the middle. Climate change is now subtly shifting the GPS map, too, as ice-sheet melt flows from the poles to the equator, slowing the planet down and lengthening our days at a rate of 1.3 milliseconds per 100 years, according to NASA.

In a very real way, Google Maps changed everything: an app driven by GPS that many of us use as unthinkingly as oxygen. When it first launched as a website in February, 2005, a new default vision of the world was suddenly unleashed – and that vision started with America.

The launch version of Google Maps on browsers just featured a disembodied outline of the U.S.; the team hadn’t even added the names of other countries. Once the rest of the world was added, there were immediate political faux pas to deal with. As former Google marketing executive Bill Kilday wrote in his book Never Lost Again, Taiwan was labelled as part of mainland China, and the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica was placed incorrectly, which had real-world consequences: Nicaragua deployed soldiers to the island of Isla Calero “and claimed it as its domain, saying, effectively, ‘Google Maps says that it is our territory.’ ”

Since then, Google seems to have adopted a split-the-difference policy: Show what that country’s government wants you to see. That’s why “Gulf of America” is what Americans can find on Google Maps, while Mexicans can see the Gulf of Mexico; in Canada, you’ll see “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America.)” Similarly, the sea between Japan and Korea goes by the Sea of Japan in the former, and the East Sea in the latter – it’s “Sea of Japan (East Sea)” in Canada – and it’s the Arabian Gulf in Arab countries and the Persian Gulf otherwise.

In that way, Google Maps is part of a long tradition, stretching from the Roman Empire to the “Gulf of America.” Depending on your IP address, or just your perspective – you might be seeing a different world.

Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Future of Free Speech, research professor at Vanderbilt University and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He is the author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media.

On Sept. 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ignited a global firestorm when it published 12 cartoons – some depicting the Prophet Muhammad – under the headline, The Face of Muhammad. What began as a challenge to self-censorship in a secular democracy quickly escalated into an international crisis that reshaped geopolitical fault lines, redefined legal boundaries, and, perhaps most profoundly, tested the resilience of liberal democracies against the rising tide of religious extremism and demands for censorship.

Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, commissioned the cartoons to challenge what he saw as an emerging climate of fear, in which the threat of violent retaliation for offending religious sensibilities was already influencing public discourse in liberal democracies. In 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death on the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamic fundamentalist, due to Mr. Van Gogh’s Islam-critical film Submission. Later that year, three Muslims became offended by and beat a Danish university lecturer who had recited from the Koran during a class. In 2005, a Danish stand-up comedian admitted that he was too afraid to poke fun at Islam while a Danish children’s author announced that he couldn’t find cartoonists for a book about the Prophet Muhammad. Accordingly, Mr. Rose tested the extent of self-censorship by asking various cartoonists to depict Muhammad as they saw him.

Mr. Rose wrote an accompanying essay entitled Freedom of Expression. His aim was not gratuitous offence or anti-Muslim bigotry, but to defend the foundational principle that free speech must apply universally – including to ideas some may deem sacred, regardless of whether they belong to a minority or not. Therefore, Mr. Rose argued, affording special protections for Islam and Muslims was “incompatible with a secular democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be prepared to endure mockery, scorn, and ridicule.” As Mr. Rose recently told me, the cartoons were based on the

A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25. premise that freedom and equality go hand in hand and that Muslims should neither suffer discrimination, nor enjoy special privileges, as equal members of Danish society.

In Western Europe, and in an extremely secular and liberal country like Denmark, where I’m originally from, this seemed like an uncontroversial idea – a principle vindicated during the Salman Rushdie affair of the late 1980s, when, despite some debate, most Western intellectuals, writers, and public opinion sided with Mr. Rushdie over Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Mr. Rushdie’s death.

Like the Rushdie affair, the cartoon crisis transformed a local debate into a global reckoning over free speech, censorship, and religious sensitivities – one whose aftershocks continue to shape Western democracies two decades later.

FROM LOCAL CONTROVERSY TO GLOBAL CRISIS

In Denmark, the immediate response to the cartoons was relatively subdued. While many criticized the decision to publish them as unnecessarily provocative, others defended Jyllands-Posten’s right to publish images that some might find offensive.

The global reaction, however, soon spiralled out of control with waves of violent protests across the Muslim world. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan gave an early warning during a visit to Denmark in November, 2005. At a news conference, Mr. Erdogan insisted that “freedom of expression is important, but more important is what is holy for me” and that the cartoons “fuel conflict.”

His warning was prophetic. In early 2006, demonstrations erupted in cities from Cairo to Jakarta. Danish embassies were attacked, set ablaze, and several Muslim countries put pressure on the Danish government to intervene and punish Jyllands-Posten. Riots led to the deaths of more than 200 people, while calls for boycotts of Danish products rippled across the Muslim world.

As the global fallout intensified the pressure on Denmark was ramped up. Editors and cartoonists involved in publishing the drawings received death threats and were forced into hiding under police protection. In the following years, security services thwarted multiple terrorist plots against Jyllands-Posten, including a particularly gruesome plan to infiltrate the newspaper’s offices, behead its staff members and display their severed heads in a public square as a grisly warning to others. Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who penned the most controversial of the cartoons depicting Muhammed with a bomb in his turban, only saved his own life by fleeing into a panic room when attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding vigilante.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an intergovernmental body representing 57 Muslim-majority countries, also seized on the publication of the cartoons as an opportunity to assert international pressure on Western democracies. What followed was a carefully orchestrated campaign to frame the cartoons as not just offensive to Islam, but also as racist hate speech.

Consequently, the cartoons provided further fuel to a long-standing OIC campaign at the United Nations to have “defamation of religions” prohibited under international human-rights law. At a high-level summit in Saudi Arabia in December, 2005, the OIC expressed “concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries” as well as over “using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions” and called on all UN member states to criminalize such offences.

By invoking existing provisions in international human-rights law – particularly Article 20 of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” – the OIC aimed to buttress their calls for global laws against blasphemy by characterizing the cartoons as a manifestation of impermissible hate speech.

Western intellectuals, human-rights organizations, and even some governments sometimes aided the OIC’s efforts by blurring the line between blasphemy and hate speech. Amnesty International released a statement titled Freedom of Speech Carries Responsibilities for All that failed to support Jyllands-Posten against calls for censorship and even suggested that the cartoons might violate the ICCPR’s Article 20 as constituting “hate speech.” Such a position was entirely at odds with Amnesty’s traditional advocacy of free speech as encompassing the right to offend religious ideas, and its support of Muslims targeted by blasphemy laws by their own governments and religious institutions.

EU Commissioner for Justice and Security Franco Frattini floated the idea of a European code of conduct for the media when reporting on Islam and other religions to ensure that “the press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”

Even the U.S. State Department under the Bush administration initially sided with the OIC. In February, 2006, a spokesperson said, “we all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

Ironically, those most likely to suffer from such expanded definitions of hate speech were Muslims living in Muslim majority countries. Take, for example, Jihad Momani, the editor-in-chief of the Jordanian newspaper alShihan, which was the first Arab paper to republish cartoons that enraged many people who had never even seen them. Mr. Momani wrote an editorial asking the question, what hurts Islam the most: an offensive cartoon or beheading hostages with a sword? Soon after he was sacked and then arrested by the police.

Amid rising far-right anti-Islamic sentiment, Western democracies struggled to counter the OIC’s successful UN resolutions on “defamation of religion.” Yet, the tide started turning in 2009 when the Obama administration rejoined the UN’s Human Rights Council. Through diplomatic pressure and incentives, the State Department – backed by European allies – launched a co-ordinated counteroffensive that steadily eroded OIC support.

By 2011, the OIC had abandoned its resolution. The U.S. then secured passage of a speech protective resolution, which affirmed that human-rights law protects people, not religions or ideologies. While it “condemned” advocacy of religious hatred, it only called for criminalizing “incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief” – language reflecting the U.S. Supreme Court’s very high standard for punishing speech under the First Amendment.