Forgotten maps reveal history and hidden agendas

James Cheshire, a professor at University College London, discovered a vast collection of old maps while exploring a little-used corridor at his university.

The collection, comprising thousands of maps and atlases, had fallen into disuse with the rise of digital cartography. Cheshire, an expert in geographic data, data science, and social sciences, began examining these forgotten maps and found they told compelling stories.

He details how a 1929 Madrid city map was secretly reprinted by the Wehrmacht in 1940 with markings for military use, demonstrating the importance of maps even as weapons during wartime. Other maps reveal political motivations. For example, Eugeniusz Romer, a geographer, used temperature lines in a 1916 atlas to visually suggest a unified Polish nation despite its division between empires.

Similarly, a US Inquiry Commission created maps in 1919 to advocate for desired territorial arrangements after World War I, leveraging the perceived authority of scientific data. Cheshire also uncovered maps reflecting ideological biases. Arthur Haberlandt, an Austrian ethnologist, created a detailed 1927/28 map of Europe’s ethnic distribution that promoted the idea of a “Greater Germany” by visually emphasizing German-populated areas.

The collection also included a map created during a 1955 Himalayan expedition by Austrian mountaineer Erwin Schneider, which is now used to track the effects of climate change in the region. Cheshire believes these historical maps are more relevant than modern digital maps because they demonstrate how cartography actively shapes history.