Most of us do not, today, live in des­per­ate need of maps. On the inter­net we can eas­i­ly find not only the cur­rent maps we need to nav­i­gate most any ter­ri­to­ry on Earth, but also an increas­ing pro­por­tion of all the maps made before as well. You can find the lat­ter in places like the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion, which, as we wrote last year here on Open Cul­ture, now boasts 91,000 his­toric maps free to down­load.  It will sure­ly add even more, as human­i­ty seems to have only just begun dig­i­tiz­ing its own many attempts to make the phys­i­cal world leg­i­ble, an art that goes back (as you know if you read the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy online) to pre­his­toric Las­caux cave paint­ings of the night sky.

By that stan­dard, the maps cur­rent­ly being dig­i­tized and uploaded by the British Library are down­right mod­ern — or ear­ly mod­ern, to be more spe­cif­ic. Dat­ing between 1500 and 1824, says Medievalists.net, these maps “are part of the Topo­graph­i­cal Col­lec­tion of King George III (K. Top),” which also includes “maps, atlases, archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings, car­toons and water­col­ors.”

Part of “the larg­er King’s Library which was pre­sent­ed to the Nation by George IV in 1823,” the col­lec­tion was amassed “dur­ing the for­ma­tive peri­od of the British Empire” and thus shows “how Britain viewed and inter­act­ed with the wider world dur­ing this peri­od.”

The British Library plans to post 40,000 of these maps (broad­ly con­sid­ered), and you can now view the first set of rough­ly 18,000 at the insti­tu­tion’s Flickr Com­mons col­lec­tion. Medievalists.net names as high­lights of the full Topo­graph­i­cal Col­lec­tion of King George III such arti­facts as “a hand-drawn map of New York City, pre­sent­ed to the future James II in 1664,” “The vast Kangxi Map of Chi­na of 1719 made by the Ital­ian Jesuit Mat­teo Ripa,” “the ear­li­est com­pre­hen­sive land-use map of Lon­don from 1800,” and even “water­col­ors by not­ed 18th cen­tu­ry artists such as Paul Sand­by and Samuel Hierony­mus Grimm.”

Many of the pieces the British Library has thus far uploaded to Flickr look like maps to us still today, but just as many, per­haps most, strike us more as works of art. This goes for tra­di­tion­al bird’s-eye-views ren­dered more vivid­ly (and some­times imag­i­na­tive­ly) than we’re used to, as well for as rich­ly drawn or even paint­ed land­scapes, all of which exist to pro­vide a faith­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tion of land, sea, and sky. You can view more such images along that spec­trum, as well as read their sto­ries in con­text, at the British Library’s Pic­tur­ing Places site. The artis­tic and his­tor­i­cal rich­ness exud­ed by these maps today echoes the more tan­gi­ble val­ue they had when first cre­at­ed: back then, those who had the maps pos­sessed the world.

via Medievalist.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Incred­i­bly Detailed, Hand­made Map Of Medieval Trade Routes

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Map­ping has always been con­tentious, no mat­ter where you look in time. Maps pre­serve ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions on paper, ratio­nal­iz­ing phys­i­cal space as they ren­der it in two dimen­sions. No mat­ter how didac­tic, they can become polit­i­cal weapons. In the case of Charles Booth’s visu­al­ly impres­sive Maps Descrip­tive of Lon­don Pover­ty, we have a series of maps whose own assump­tions can some­times seem at odds with their osten­si­ble pur­pose: to improve the liv­ing con­di­tions of London’s poor.

Booth’s “colour­ful pover­ty maps were cre­at­ed between 1886 and 1903,” Zoe Craig writes at Lon­don­ist, as part of a “ground-break­ing study into the lives of ordi­nary Lon­don­ers.” A phil­an­thropist born into wealth in the ship­ping trade, Booth took it upon him­self to study pover­ty in Lon­don in order to ini­ti­ate social reforms.

He suc­ceed­ed. The study, con­duct­ed by Booth and a team of researchers, led to the cre­ation of Old Age pen­sions, which Booth called “lim­it­ed social­ism,” as well as school meals for hun­gry chil­dren. He was clear about that fact that he saw such reforms as a bul­wark against social­ist rev­o­lu­tion.

The study’s sev­en­teen vol­umes are filled with pic­turesque accounts. “Pick­ing through the tid­bits of infor­ma­tion from these people’s lives will make you feel a bit like a Vic­to­ri­an cos­tume dra­ma police detec­tive,” Craig remarks. This ref­er­ence to polic­ing feels point­ed, giv­en the role of the police in main­tain­ing class hier­ar­chies in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. As an Amer­i­can, it can be hard to look at Booth’s map and not also see the 20th redlin­ing prac­tices in U.S. cities. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the cat­e­gories Booth applied to London’s class­es:

Called ‘Inquiry Into the Life and Labour of the Peo­ple in Lon­don’, the epic work stud­ied fam­i­lies and res­i­dents liv­ing across Lon­don, and coloured the streets accord­ing to their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion: between black for ‘low­est class, vicious, semi-crim­i­nal’ through pink for mixed ‘some com­fort­able, some poor’ to orange for ‘wealthy’.

As in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pater­nal­is­tic 1965 report on the Black under­class in the U.S., the lan­guage rein­forces Social Dar­win­ist ideas that deem the “low­est class” unfit for full par­tic­i­pa­tion in civ­il society—“vicious, semi-crim­i­nal…”

Of course, the social and his­tor­i­cal con­text dif­fers marked­ly, but we might also con­sid­er Fear­gus O’Sullivan’s obser­va­tions at Bloomberg City­Lab. A new pub­lished edi­tion of the map, he writes, “accom­pa­nied by com­pelling if bleak peri­od pho­tos, reveals a city that pos­sess­es echoes of Lon­don today. It depicts, after all, a dense­ly-packed metrop­o­lis with a cos­mopoli­tan pop­u­la­tion where immense­ly wealthy peo­ple lived just around the cor­ner from neigh­bors who were strug­gling to make ends meet.”

Maps may not cre­ate the social con­di­tions they describe, but they can help per­pet­u­ate them, ren­der­ing peo­ple vis­i­ble in ways that allow for even more con­trol over their lives. Crit­i­cisms of Booth’s study claimed that not only did the pro­posed reforms not go far enough but that the report described London’s class struc­ture while offer­ing lit­tle to no analy­sis of the caus­es of pover­ty. In lan­guage that sound­ed less objec­tion­able to Vic­to­ri­an ears, the poor are most­ly blamed for their own con­di­tion.

None of the study’s par­tic­u­lar lim­i­ta­tions take away from the graph­ic achieve­ments of its maps and explana­to­ry charts. They are, the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics writes, a strik­ing “ear­ly exam­ple of social car­tog­ra­phy.” The LSE hosts an incred­i­bly detailed, search­able, high-res­o­lu­tion inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the maps, assem­bled togeth­er and over­laid on a mod­ern GPS map of Lon­don. They also detail the var­i­ous edi­tions of the maps as they appeared between 1898 and 1903.

Hand-col­ored and based on the 1869 Ord­nance Sur­vey, the maps seemed “suf­fi­cient­ly impor­tant” to Booth to war­rant “com­pre­hen­sive revi­sion.” Here, the police appear in per­son to guide the process. “Social inves­ti­ga­tors accom­pa­nied police­men on their beats across Lon­don,” the LSE writes, “and record­ed their own impres­sions of each street and the com­ments of the police­men.” You can read the police note­books from these sur­veys at the LSE and learn more about the 12 dis­trict maps and the demo­graph­ic data they rep­re­sent at Map­ping Lon­don. The LSE print­ed a hard­cov­er print edi­tion of Booth’s work in 2019, com­plete with 500 illus­tra­tions. You can pur­chase a copy here. Or vis­it the inter­ac­tive edi­tion here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Ani­ma­tions Visu­al­ize the Evo­lu­tion of Lon­don and New York: From Their Cre­ation to the Present Day

Syn­chro­nized, Time­lapse Video Shows Train Trav­el­ing from Lon­don to Brighton in 1953, 1983 & 2013

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one. argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing.. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness