Saturday, January 9, 2010: 12:10 PM
Manchester Ballroom D (Hyatt)
The paper is a study how the political climate of the World Wars ultimately and effectively destroyed the greatest historical effort at international cartographic cooperation, the International Map of the World, humans' first attempt at mapping the entire surface of the earth in detail on a uniform scale. Albrect Penck's initial idea for a thoroughly detailed topographic map of the world, proposed at Fifth International Geographical Conference in 1891 and securing the support, both symbolic and financial, of many of the world's governments in 1913, consisted of a uniform series of topographical maps overlaid with geophysical and human data (urbanized areas, railroads, etc.) and utilizing the most precise polyconic methods for representing the world available at the time. Among tensions leading to the First World War many governments abandoned their support of the project, in part because the kind of internationalism the IMW represented fell out of favor during this period. Primary governmental support for mapping at this time came to correspond with territorial interests and claims, reflecting a kind of nationalism that was to culminate in the Second World War. A series of attempts to keep the project alive with the support of Multinational and Non-Governmental Organizations during the Cold War failed. The slow demise of the project with dwindling funds and scant support of any kind ultimately signifies the difficulty of a project that disacknowledged the importance of socially, culturally, and politically constructed boundaries by using another scale, in this case, a global, geophysical scale, to frame its maps. The IMW and its social and political failure during, after, and perhaps because of the world wars, thus demonstrate a twentieth-century triumph of politics and identities over geographical knowledge, regardless of the evidence it could muster, the quality of its representations, or the strength of its arguments.