There was a memorable scene from "The West Wing" on the biases imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator makes North America look huge:
If you want to avoid YouTube, here's just the video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/szn691fdcgvxwh8/map_proj...
edit: updated YouTube link to include the full version
A globe is the only correct projection, and I have personally never looked at a globe and thought "Wow, I've been deceived!" Google maps now even switches to trying to do a globe projection when you zoom out far enough.
This is a ridiculous issue for smug people to bring up at parties.
Surely this utility was only ever useful for sailors, and these days not even them?
With a globe you can only see part of Earth at once.
Which is why that West Wing clip is, frankly, pretentious, because it doesn’t discuss the negatives of Peters, wrongly implies that it’s “the” correct way to view the world, and makes no mention of other major projections, or even a globe.
Choice of map projection is all about context. Peters is sensible in a particular context; Mercator in another; a globe in another. My usual projection of choice is Albers, which is typically great for the continental US, but I probably wouldn’t use it so much if I regularly made maps of other places!
And honestly, it's a bit pretentious to publicly denounce an entertaining TV show just to seem smarter than everyone at cocktail parties.
He was born in the County of Flanders, current day East Flanders and moved to Germany at the age of 40.
Everything was a bit complicated in that region in the medieval period. In the C16, you immediately come up short with the concept of "Germany".
Same with Italy, which wasn't a single state until the mid XIX century. Over to the east states lost independence and remained so for hundreds of years, only to re-emerge in the XX century.
My point is that state as an entity doesn't fully define one's identity.
Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.
The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.
You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.
[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...
IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as
1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)
2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)
3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.
4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"
I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order
I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".
Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...
For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!
It’s not important where they are made. It’s important where they are designed.
I expect there’s lots of maps with Asia in the center, but I don’t expect people in the US to buy them.
Then you changed it to who designed the maps.
In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make the decision.
Make up your mind?
They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:
https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...
Your starting point or any other point?
They're not characters, they're tools to push a message.