Coloring Outside the Lines: The Secrets Maps Hide

Image Source: Frau Mauro's 1459 AD World Map, vividmaps.com

BY STAFF WRITER BENJAMIN GUZOVSKY ‘23

We question everything. News. Data. Suspicious statistics. We argue about the world’s biggest problems and the littlest details of our own lives. Some of our arguments are clean cut—easily settled by a Google search or a fact checker. Others grow more dangerous as our most-trusted sources erode their journalistic standards. It’s becoming harder to know where to look for answers.

There are some things, however, that it never occurs to us to question. They’re not quite polarizing or engaging enough to hold our attention. They’re the implicit lies that are too well-hidden to make us think twice. They’re ordinary.

Take a look at this map of the Mughal Empire, which controlled the Indian peninsula for two centuries thanks to the invention of gunpowder.

This map is one of the first results from a Google search for “Mughal Empire Map”. It doesn’t raise any immediate red flags, but allow me to ask a probing question: what does being a part of the Mughal Empire mean? In other words, to what degree does the Mughal Empire actually control all of the highlighted regions? And is that control cultural, political, or economic? The control is certainly not the same everywhere. Port cities were largely independent and the Empire was not able to tax the whole of the Indian Peninsula. The area added in orange area 1707 also needs some complicating. Its coastal territories shown had heavy European political and economic influences that are not shown.

The map-maker wasn’t wrong to put things together this way, and one does get a general idea of the Mughal Empire’s growth, as the title would suggest. It is not the cartographer’s job to define the concept of empire. But this is simplification, a necessary whittling down to the most important details. A more precise map would have been much more confusing. Cartographer Mark Monmonier addresses issues like this in How To Lie With Maps, a book that covers everything from distortion and scale to satellite mapping and commercial interests. However, he doesn’t deal enough with the oversimplification issue. To understand that more fully, we’ll need to take a step back.

A long time ago I went to a talk by Professor Anne-Marie Grisogono of Flinders University in Australia. Grisogono is a complex systems scientist, which loosely means that she is an expert in solving complex problems. She posed a very interesting question: What is the biggest cause of conflict in the world? Many answers come to mind, but it seems difficult to answer definitively. There was an extensive UN study done to find an answer, and the result was definitive: borders are the number one cause of conflict. Can maps, I wondered, help us predict conflict then?

In his landmark book When Maps Become the World, Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther demonstrates the privilege and power held by the map creator and the extent to which the choices of what to include and leave out can “remake the world”. Maps show us only one definition of a border, and it is not the most important one. We need to look at social and ethnic borders, borders on the smallest scales and the largest, borders within communities and borders between religious groups, and ideological and political borders, too. Maps divide the world into countries:

But what does this tell us? For so long, I looked at modern world maps and thought, wow, the world today has conflict, but nowhere near as much as it used to. Maps change rarely, borders seem fixed, and countries are contained. All world maps should have this footnote: *only shows internationally recognized countries.

Yemen has been divided by a civil war since 2014. Somalia contains two autonomous states. Myanmar has been torn apart by internal conflict that has not abated since 1948. The list goes on. Maps hide these divisions when they should be the objective, unbiased sources for us to learn more about them. Yes, borders are always in flux, but here the world has long been passively oversimplified.

Look at the fine print on this map:

This one, made in the midst of Somalia’s civil war, knows its place. It distinguishes between regions controlled by the UIC (Islamic Courts Union) and those allied with it, it uses soft hues to suggest the flexibility of these areas of control, and most importantly, it is not afraid to leave a region blank: the coastal area between Somaliland and Puntland. All images need context. We would never make conclusions from just any random photograph, yet it’s easy to think that maps are different because they are made to look official and careful. Maps should come with captions and context too.

Let’s return to the Mughals. If you want to learn more about the Mughal Empire, you’ll turn to a large number of sources, hear from some experts, and certainly consult your maps. Few people look at that map we analyzed earlier as the final ruling on all things Mughal. But that is exactly how we look at world maps. We take brief glances at them and subliminally begin to think we know the world—a dangerously implicit way to think.

Everything is simplified and streamlined, engineered to be easily digestible. Keep wondering—keep questioning what’s beneath the surface of all the things we take for granted.