Maps are a useful tool when teaching history, but few realise just how complicated they actually are. Maps are created by a discipline known as Cartography. It is the cartographer’s job to communicate the complicated three-dimensional world in a simple two-dimensional format. This involves trade-offs, simplifications, and an understanding of what the cartographer wants to communicate.
Drovers, Markets, and Selective Memory
One of my favourite maps is a map of the Drovers’ roads used to drive cattle to market in the years before industrial refrigeration and railways. For centuries, cattle would be raised in the West of England and Wales then driven across the country to London and the South East for slaughter and consumption.
What this map shows is not an accurate description of England, but rather a representation of what drovers needed to know to successfully get their cattle to market. The map shows the start of the drive and the end of the drive, then the routes from the start to the end with useful stops along the way. It is economical in that it does not show unnecessary information. For example, in Warwickshire, it shows the micro-hamlet of Berkswell but not the 19th-century powerhouse of Coventry. Using this, a teacher can illustrate to learners how maps are selective according to the needs of those who use them.
Mapping Change Over Time
Berkswell is now a very small, but interesting hamlet. This brings us to another opportunity for maps to the teacher: illustrating change over time. In my role as a school governor, I work closely with the history lead to develop and improve the history curriculum. One of the questions that comes up regularly is how to communicate to children change over time. In a world where some children cannot imagine not having microwaves and mobile phones, change is sometimes difficult to communicate without visual tools.
Maps are an excellent tool for showing children that things have not always been as they are now. With very little work, it is possible to obtain Ordnance Survey maps of an area which can show the development of the area where the children live, their houses, and their school, showing when familiar buildings were built and what was there before. Sometimes—and this is not easy—it is possible to access photographs or even plans of the places on the map. I find these pictures on Facebook groups, online, and in Archives. In my collection are photographs of my housing estate being built in the 1930s and the plans that included interesting features never completed.
Power, Politics, and the Fish’s Perspective
Finally, maps can tell us a lot about the power relationships of the people who drew them and published them. The world is, as we all know, a globe, and representing a globe on a sheet of paper poses problems and distortions. Such distortions make some continents and countries look bigger and some smaller than they actually are, which leads to political and power questions. Whose country is going to be diminished and whose is going to be enlarged? Who goes in the middle? Which way up does the map go—who said North should be at the top?
Ultimately, these questions rest on who is making, using, or promoting the map and why. It is said that the modern map (the Mercator Projection) was chosen by Queen Victoria because it made Canada look massive. She liked Canada. There probably is something in this, because the map makes European countries look bigger and more important than their rivals. This has not been lost on academics and artists who have, over the years, created alternative maps illustrating alternative points of view. The most creative I have ever seen was a map of the world from a fish’s perspective. It was centred on the ocean, bordered by seashores, and with no detail of the land.