Our World Maps are Not Colonial or “Racist”
A map is a lie that tells the truth. That is not a slogan. It is the first fact of cartography. The Earth is a sphere, slightly flattened, spinning, and continuously changing at the edges of ice and coast. Paper is flat. A screen is flat. Any attempt to put one onto the other must choose what to preserve and what to sacrifice. Distances, areas, angles, directions, shapes: you cannot keep them all. Every projection is therefore an idealisation. Every map is inaccurate in a way its maker has decided to live with. To call one of those choices "colonialist" or "racist" is to treat geometry as a moral crime.
The campaign now aimed at the Mercator projection proceeds as if a 16th-century Flemish craftsman had sat down to make Europe look fat and the tropics look thin out of racial spite. He did not. Gerardus Mercator needed a chart on which a constant compass bearing would appear as a straight line. Sailors could then plot a rhumb and hold a course. That property is not an ideology. It is a solution to a problem that exists whether or not anyone has ever heard of Flanders. The cost of the solution is well known: land near the poles inflates; land near the equator shrinks. Greenland looks the size of Africa. It is not. Anyone who has spun a globe already knows this. The distortion is not a secret whispered in colonial ministries. It is printed in every decent atlas as a warning.
The alternative now being waved as the honest map: Equal Earth and its cousins, is not honesty. It is a different bargain. Area is protected, so countries near the equator look larger relative to those near the poles. In exchange, shapes collapse. Greenland becomes a squat smear. Antarctica is stretched into a ribbon. Continents look as if they have been sat on. That is not a more truthful Earth. It is an Earth that has been flattened according to another set of priorities. If the priority is to make certain countries look more important on a wall poster, the projection will do that work. Importance is not a unit of area. A country is not more real because a particular formula has been chosen to puff its outline.
Once you accept that all maps are idealisations, the political charge falls apart. There is no innocent map waiting to be restored after the colonialists are expelled. Chinese, Arab, and Polynesian chart-makers also reduced the world to lines that served a purpose: trade winds, star paths, tribute routes, the next island. Medieval European maps put Jerusalem at the centre because that was the sacred geometry they required. Modern tourist maps enlarge the city and shrink the countryside because tourists do not need a conformal projection of the wheat belt. Each of these is "inaccurate." Each is useful to someone. Usefulness is not oppression.
The deeper confusion is the belief that representation must be morally proportionate. If Africa is large in square kilometres, the argument goes, it must occupy a large share of the page, or the page is an act of erasure. That is a category error. A map is not a parliament. It does not allocate dignity by acreage. Population, output, history, and military reach are not functions of how wide a country looks on a classroom wall. Treating the Mercator grid as a racial hierarchy is a way of avoiding the harder facts: that some societies mapped the oceans when others had not, that navigation created the modern world whether one likes the navigators or not, and that no committee of the General Assembly can vote the sphere into a more convenient shape.
Children should be taught the limitation, not the sermon. Show them a globe. Show them why seasons exist. Show them a Mercator chart and an equal-area chart side by side and ask what each is for. That is education. Declaring one projection colonial and another emancipatory is not. It is the same habit that turns every tool into a confession: the clock is Western time, the calendar is liturgical imposition, the kilometre is metric imperialism. At the end of that road there is no map at all, only a demand that the world rearrange itself until it flatters the complainant.
The sphere does not care. It will not become fairer because a resolution has been passed. It will still refuse to lie flat. The honest response is not to hunt for a politically hygienic projection. It is to admit what every cartographer already knows: we draw useful fictions, we label the distortions, and we get on with finding our way.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/are-our-maps-colonialist/
