The emergence of global commerce in recent centuries, along with accompanying urbanization, radically reconfigured how humans lived, and how they understood the world. Can some maps prejudice our views of the world, or its parts, if drawn in particular ways?.What might they tell us about the times and places they represent? Many old maps were made, in their time, for practical uses, such as navigation.Might how we represent the world shape how we interpret its history?.How have ideas of what constitutes the world, and its history, changed over time?.What do we look for when we set out to study the “world”?.And all offer avenues for thinking about world history-what it means, how its study might be undertaken, and what ideas and evidence inform it. All offer examples of how the earth’s surface has been understood by various people at various times. Others were made for more immediately practical uses. Some of these maps were drawn to explain the world’s shape, form, and content. The following selection of maps traces a broad arc across different traditions of thinking about the world and representing it. Similar accounts of world history have used this technique of territorial coloring to depict the world as an amalgam of past, present, and future nation-states, even though this model of social and political organization-the nation-state-is a fairly recent phenomenon, and by no means a universal one. Many “historical” atlases presented history as a localized story of nation-building, depicting the spread of one particular color, to represent territorial control, across a landscape. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “historical” maps were often drawn to promote particular political-or territorial-agendas. Maps have also come to be used to illustrate historical accounts, but have often done this in simplified-and problematic-ways. As humans began to employ more sophisticated measuring, data-gathering, and visualizing techniques, maps became ways of understanding the earth’s shape, form, its place in the solar system, and the systems on its surface that have made sustaining life on it possible. Still others were drawn to claim property or territory. Some maps were drawn to aid navigation, others to distinguish farming areas, or to locate settlements, hunting or fishing grounds, or religious sites. Humans in every corner of the earth have drawn maps as long as they have had tools to draw. Pietro Martire d’Aghiera, Map of the Caribbean for the Spanish Crown (1511) Maps, visual representations of aspects of the earth’s surface, can offer graphic evidence of how human views of the world have differed and how these views have themselves changed over time. In other cases, historians work to interpret visual evidence from sources like paintings, drawings, tapestries, buildings, and, sometimes, the earth’s surface, particularly in places where it has changed noticeably. Historians commonly consult written documents such as personal letters and government or business records, if these are available. Historians most often rely on documented accounts of what happened at a particular time and place, and work from these to explain how and why these events took place. It involves an ongoing process of making sense of evidence and evaluating the significance of that evidence. Learning history is not a matter of learning a given set of facts about the past. As societies came into contact with one another, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, these known worlds became ever larger, and stories of world history had to change to make sense of new situations. For millennia, the “known” world in these accounts was very local. As long as people have recognized a world, they have sought to explain how it came to be, and how and why it, and their experience of it, has changed over time. Giving an account of the history of the world is an ancient practice.

Map outlines world history